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I 



BIOGRAPHICAL 



AND 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, 



BY 



WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, 

AUTHOR OP 

•*THE HISTORY OP FERDINAND AND ISABELLA," "THE 

CONQUEST OP MEXICO," ETC. 






NE W-Y RK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS. 

82 CLIFF STREET. 

1851. 






Eniered, accorJing to Act of Congress, in the year 1S4:;, by 

Harper & Brothers, 
In the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York. 



TO 



GEORGE TICKNOR, ESQ., 

THIS VOLUME, 

WHICH MAY 
REMIND HIM OP STUDIES PURSUED TOGETHER IN EARLIER DAYS. 

Ks affcctConatcIa? 3Betr(catc^, 

BY HIS FRIEND, 

WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. 



ADVERTISEMENT 

OP 

THE AMERICAN PUBLISHERS. 



As many of the pieces in this volume are the re» 
suit of more care than is usually bestowed on peri- 
odical writing, and as they embrace a range of study 
very different from that by which Mr. Prescott has 
been hitherto known as an author, it is thought that 
the repubUcation of them in this form will be accept- 
able to his countrymen. The publishers have taken 
care that the mechanical execution of the book shall 
be uniform with that of his historical works. 

H. & B. 

mw-York, 1845. 



PREFACE 

TO THE ENGLISH EDITION. 

The following Essays, with a single exception, 
have been selected from contributions originally 
made to the North American Review. They are 
purely of a literary character; and as they have 
little reference to local or temporary topics, and as 
the journal in which they appeared, though the 
most considerable in the United States, is not widely 
circulated in Great Britain, it has been thought that 
a repubUcation of the articles might have some 
novelty and interest for the English reader. 

Several of the papers were written many years 
since ; and the author is aware that they betray 
those crudities in the execution which belong to an 
unpractised writer, while others of more recent date 
may be charged with the inaccuracies incident to 
rapid, |ind, sometimes, careless composition. The 
more obvious blemishes he has endeavoured to cor- 
rect, without attempting to reform the critical judg- 
ments, which, in some cases, he could wish had been 
expressed in a more quahfied and temperate man- 
ner; and he dismisses the volume with the hope 
that, in submitting it to the British public, he may 
not be thought to have relied too far on that indul- 
gence which has been so freely extended to his more 
elaborate efforts. 

Boston, March 30th, 1845, 



CONTENTS. 



Page 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, THE AMERICAN NOVELIST . 1 

ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND . . . . . .57 

IRVINg's conquest op GRANADA 88 

cervantes 123 

sir walter scott . . . . . . .176 

Chateaubriand's English literature . • . 245 
Bancroft's united states 294 

MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO .... 340 

moliere . 361 

italian narrative poetry 410 

poetry and romance op the italians • • . 486 

scottish song 568 

DA PONTE's OBSERVATIONS 596 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL 

MISCELLANIES. 



MEMOIR OF 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 

THE AMERICAN NOVELIST.* 

The class of professed men of letters, if we ex- 
clude from the account the conductors of periodical 
journals, is certainly not very large, even at the 
present day, in our country ; but before the close 
of the last century it was nearly impossible to meet 
with an individual who looked to authorship as his 
only, or, indeed, his principal means of subsistence. 
This was somewhat the more remarkable, consider- 
ing the extraordinary development of intellectual 
pow.er exhibited in every quarter of the country, 
and applied to every variety of moral and social 
culture, and formed a singular contrast with more 
than one nation in Europe, where literature still 
continued to be followed as a distinct profession, 
amid all the difficulties resulting from an arbitrary 
government, and popular imbecility and ignorance. 

Abundant reasons are suggested for this by the 
various occupations afforded to talent of all kinds, 
not only in the exercise of political functions, but 

* From Sparks's American Biography, 1834. 

• A 



2 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

in the splendid career opened to enterprise of every 
description in our free and thriving community. 
We were in the morning of life, as it were, when 
everything summoned us to action ; when the spirit 
was quickened by hope and youthful confidence ; 
and we felt that we had our race to run, unlike 
those nations who, having reached the noontide of 
their glory, or sunk into their decline, were natu- 
rally led to dwell on the soothing recollections of 
the past, and to repose themselves, after a tumultu- 
ous existence, in the quiet pleasures of study and 
contemplation. " It was amid the ruins of the 
Capitol," says Gibbon, "that I first conceived the 
idea of writing the History of the Roman Empire." 
The occupation suited well with the spirit of the 
place, but would scarcely have harmonized with 
the life of busthng energy, and the thousand novel- 
ties which were perpetually stimulating the appe- 
tite for adventure in our new and unexplored hem- 
isphere. In short, to express it in one word, the 
peculiarities of our situation as naturally disponed 
us to active life as those of the old countries of Eu- 
rope to contemplative. 

The subject of the present memoir affords an al- 
most solitary example, at this period, of a scholar, 
in the enlarged application of the term, who culti- 
vated letters as a distinct and exclusive profession, 
resting his means of support, as well as his fame, 
on his success ; and who, as a writer of fiction, is 
still farther entitled to credit for having quitted the 
beaten grounds of the Old Country, and sought his 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 6 

subjects in the untried wilderness of his own. The 
particulars of his unostentatious life have been col- 
lected with sufficient industry by his friend, Mr. 
Wilham Dunlap, to whom our native literature is 
under such large obligations for the extent and fidel- 
ity of his researches. We will select a few of the 
most prominent incidents from a mass of miscella- 
neous fragments and literary lumber with which 
his work is somewhat encumbered. It were to be 
wished that, in the place of some of them, more 
copious extracts had been substituted for his jour- 
nal and correspondence, which, doubtless, in this as 
in other cases, must afford the most interesting, as 
well as authentic materials for biography. 

Charles Brogkden Brown was born at Phila- 
delphia, January 17, 1771. He was descended 
from a highly respectable family, whose ancestors 
were of that estimable sect who came over with 
William Penn to seek an asylum where they might 
worship their Creator unmolested in the meek and 
humble spirit of their own faith. From his earliest 
childhood Brown gave evidence of his studious pro- 
pensities, being frequently noticed by his father, on 
his return from school, poring over some heavy 
tome, nothing daunted by the formidable words it 
contained, or mounted on a table, and busily en- 
gaged in exploring a map which hung on the par- 
lour wall. This infantine predilection for geograph- 
ical studies ripened into a passion in later years. 
Another anecdote, recorded of him at the age of 
ten, sets in a still stronger light his appreciation of 



4 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

intellectual pursuits far above his years. A visiter 
at his father's having rebuked him, as it would seem, 
without cause, for some remark he had made, gave 
him the contemptuous epithet of " boy." " What 
does he mean," said the young philosopher, after the 
guest's departure, " by calling me boy 1 Does he 
not know that it is neither size nor age, but sense, 
that makes the man ? I could ask him a hundred 
questions, none of which he could answer." 

At eleven years of age he was placed under the 
tuition of Mr. Robert Proud, well known as the au- 
thor of the History of Pennsylvania. Under his 
direction he went over a large course of English 
reading, and acquired the elements of Greek and 
Latin, applying himself with great assiduity to his 
studies. His bodily health was naturally delicate, 
and indisposed him to engage in the robust, athletic 
exercises of boyhood. His sedentary habits, how- 
ever, began so evidently to impair his health, thai 
his master recommended him to withdraw from his 
books, and recruit his strength by excursions on foot 
into the country. These pedestrian rambles suited 
the taste of the pupil, and the length of his absence 
often excited the apprehensions of his friends for 
his safety. He may be thought to have sat to him- 
self for this portrait of one of his heroes. " I pre- 
ferred to ramble in the forest and loiter on the hill ; 
perpetually to change the scene ; to scrutinize the 
endless variety of objects ; to compare one leaf and 
pebble with another ; to pursue those trains of 
thought which their resemblances and differences 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 5 

suggested; to inquire what it was that gave them 
this place, structure, and form, were more agreeable 
employments than ploughing and threshing." "My 
frame was dehcate and feeble. Exposure to wet 
blasts and vertical suns was sure to make me sick." 
The fondness for these solitary rambles continued 
through life, and the familiarity which they opened 
to him with the grand and beautiful scenes of na- 
ture undoubtedly contributed to nourish the habit 
of revery and abstraction, and to deepen the ro- 
mantic sensibilities from which flowed so much of 
his misery, as well as happiness, in after life. 

He quitted Mr. Proud's school before the age of 
sixteen. He had previously made some small po- 
etical attempts, and soon after sketched the plans 
of three several epics, on the discovery of America, 
and the conquests of Peru and Mexico. For some 
time they engaged his attention to the exclusion of 
every other object. No vestige of them now re- 
mains, or, at least, has been given to the public, by 
which we can ascertain the progress made towards 
their completion. The publication of such imma- 
ture juvenile productions may gratify curiosity by 
affording a point of comparison with later excel- 
lence. They are rarely, however, of value in them- 
selves sufficient to authorize their exposure to the 
world, and notwithstanding the occasional excep- 
tion of a Pope or a Pascal, may very safely put up 
with Uncle Toby's recommendation on a similar 
display of precocity, " to hush it up, and say as little 
about it as possible," 



t) BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Among the contributions which, at a later period 
of hfe, he was in the habit of making to different 
journals, the fate of one was too singular to be pass- 
ed over in silence. It was a poetical address to 
Franklin, prepared for the Edentown newspaper. 
*' The blundering printer," says Brown, in his jour- 
nal, " from zeal or ignorance, or perhaps from both, 
substituted the name of Washington. Washington, 
therefore, stands arrayed in awkward colours ; phi- 
losophy smiles to behold her darhng son ; she turns 
with horror and disgust from those who have won 
the laurel of victory in the field of battle, to this her 
favourite candidate, who had never participated in 
such bloody glory, and whose fame was derived 
from the conquest of philosophy alone. The print- 
er, by his blundering ingenuity, made the subject 
ridiculous. Every word of this clumsy panegyric 
was a direct slander upon Washington, and so it 
was regarded at the time." There could not well 
be imagined a more expeditious or effectual recipe 
for converting eulogy into satire. 

Young Brown had now reached a period of life 
when it became necessary to decide on a profession. 
After due deliberation, he determined on the law; 
a choice which received the cordial approbation of 
his friends, who saw in his habitual dihgence and 
the character of his mind, at once comprehensive 
and logical, the most essential requisites for success. 
He entered on the studies of his profession with his 
usual ardour ; and the acuteness and copiousness of 
his arguments on various topics proposed for dis- 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 7 

cussion in a law-society over which he presided, 
bear ample testimony to his ability and industry. 
But, however suited to his talents the profession of 
the law might be, it was not at all to his taste. He 
became a member of a literary club, in which he 
made frequent essays in composition and eloquence. 
He kept a copious journal, and by famihar exercise 
endeavoured to acquire a pleasing and graceful style 
of writing ; and every hour that he could steal from 
professional schooling was devoted to the cultiva* 
tion of more attractive literature. In one of his 
contributions to a journal, just before this period, 
he speaks of " the rapture with which he held com- 
munion with his own thoughts amid the gloom of 
surrounding woods, where his fancy peopled every 
object with ideal beings, and the barrier between 
himself and the w^orld of spirits seemed burst by the 
force of meditation. In this solitude, he felt him- 
self surrounded by a delightful society ; but when 
transported from thence, and compelled to listen to 
the frivolous chat of his fellow-beings, he suffered 
all the miseries of solitude." He declares that liis 
intercourse and conversation with mankind had 
w^rought a salutary change ; that he can now min- 
gle in the concerns of life, perform his appropriate 
duties, and reserve that higher species of discourse 
for the solitude and silence of his study. In this 
supposed control over his romantic fancies he gross- 
ly deceived himself 

As the time approached for entering on the prac- 
tice of his profession, he felt his repugnance to it 



8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

increase more and more ; and he sought to justify a 
retreat from it aUogether by such poor sophistry as 
liis imagination could suggest. He objected to the 
profession as having something in it immoral. He 
could not reconcile it with his notions of duty to come 
forward as the champion indiscriminately of right and 
wrong; and he considered the stipendiary advocate 
of a guilty party as becoming, by that very act, parti- 
cipator in the guilt. He did not allow^ himself to 
reflect that no more equitable arrangement could be 
devised, none which would give the humblest indi- 
vidual so fair a chance for maintaining his rights 
as the employment of competent and upright coun- 
sel, familiar with the forms of legal practice, neces- 
sarily so embarrassing to a stranger ; that, so far 
from being compelled to undertake a cause mani- 
festly unjust, it is always in the power of an honest 
lawyer to decline it; but that such contingencies 
are of most rare occurrence, as few cases are litiga- 
ted where each party has not previously plausible 
grounds for believing himself in the right, a ques- 
tion only to be settled by fair discussion on both 
sides ; that opportunities are not wanting, on the 
other hand, which invite the highest display of elo- 
quence and professional science in detecting and 
defeating villany, in vindicating slandered innocence, 
and in expounding the great principles of law on 
w^hich the foundations of personal security and prop- 
erty are established ; and, finally, that the most illus- 
trious names in his own and every other civihzed 
country have been drawn from the ranks of a pro- 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 9 

fession whose habitual discipUne so well trains them 
for legislative action, and the exercise of the high- 
est political functions. 

Brown cannot be supposed to have been insensi- 
ble to these obvious views; and, indeed, from one of 
his letters in later life, he appears to have clearly 
recognised the value of the profession he had de- 
serted. But his object was, at this time, to justify 
himself in his fickleness of purpose, as he best might, 
in his own eyes and those of his friends. Brown 
was certainly not the first man of genius who found 
himself incapable of resigning the romantic world 
of fiction, and the uncontrolled revels of the imagi- 
nation, for the dull and prosaic realities of the law. 
Few, indeed, like Mansfield, have been able so far 
to constrain their young and buoyant imaginations 
as to merit the beautiful eulogium of the English 
poet; while many more comparatively, from the 
time of Juvenal downward, fortunately for the world, 
have been willing to sacrifice the affections plighted 
to Themis on the altars of the Muse. 

Brown's resolution at this crisis caused sincere 
regret to his friends, which they could not conceal, 
on seeing him thus suddenly turn from the path of 
honourable fame at the very moment when he was 
prepared to enter on it. His prospects, but lately 
so brilliant, seemed now overcast with a deep gloom. 
The embarrassments of his situation had also a most 
unfavourable effect on his own mind. Instead of 
the careful discipl'ne to which it had been lately 
subjected, it was now left to rove at large wherever 

B 



10 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

caprice should dictate, and waste itself on those 
romantic reveries and speculations to which he was 
naturally too much addicted. This was the period 
when the French Revolution was in its heat, and 
the awful convulsion experienced in one unhappy 
country seemed to be felt in every quarter of the 
globe ; men grew familiar with the wildest para- 
doxes, and the spirit of innovation menaced the 
oldest and best established principles in morals and 
government. Brown's inquisitive and speculative 
mind partook of the prevailing skepticism. Some 
of his compositions, and especially one on the 
Rights of Women, published in 1797, show to what 
extravagance a benevolent mind may be led by fast- 
ening too exclusively on the contemplation of the 
evils of existing institutions, and indulging in indef- 
inite dreams of perfectibility. 

There is no period of existence when the spirit 
of a man is more apt to be depressed than when he 
is about to quit the safe and quiet harbour in which 
he has rode in safetv from childhood, and to launch 
on the dark and unknow^n ocean where so many a 
gallant bark has gone down before him. How much 
must this disquietude be increased in the case of one 
who, like Brown, has thrown away the very chart 
and compass by which he was prepared to guide 
himself through the doubtful perils of the voyage ! 
How heavily the gloom of despondency fell on his 
spirits at this time is attested by various extracts 
from his private correspondence. "As for me," he 
says, in one of his letters, "I long ago discovered 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 11 

that Nature had not qualified me for an actor on this 
stage. The nature of my edueation only added to 
these disqualifications, and I experienced all those 
deviations from the centre which arise when all our 
lessons are taken from books, and the scholar makes 
his own character the comment. A happy destiny, 
indeed, brought me to the knowledge of two or three 
minds which Nature had fashioned in the same 
mould with my own, but these are gone. And, O 
God ! enable me to wait the moment when it is thy 
will that I should follow them." In another epistle 
he remarks, "I have not been deficient in the pur- 
suit of that necessary branch of knowledge, the study 
of myself I will not explain the result, for have I 
not already sufficiently endeavoured to make my 
friends unhappy by communications which, though 
they might easily be injurious, could not be of any 
possible advantage 1 I really, dear W., regret that 
period when your pity was first excited in my fa- 
vour. I sincerely lament that I ever gave you rea- 
son to imagine that I was not so happy as a gay in- 
difference with regard to the present, stubborn for- 
getfulness with respect to the uneasy past, and ex- 
cursions into lightsome futurity could make me ; for 
what end, what useful purposes were promoted by 
the discovery? It could not take away from the 
number of the unhappy, but only add to it, by ma- 
king those who loved me participate in my uneasi- 
ness, which each participation, so far from tending 
to diminish, would, in reality, increase, by adding 
those regrets, of which I had been the author in 



12 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

them, to my own original stock." It is painful to 
witness the struggles of a generous spirit endeavour- 
ing to suppress the anguish thus involuntarily esca- 
ping in the warmth of affectionate intercourse. This 
becomes still more striking in the contrast exhibited 
betw^een the assumed cheerfulness of much of his 
correspondence at this period and the uniform mel- 
ancholy tone of his private journal, the genuine rec- 
ord of his emotions. 

Fortunately, his taste, refined by intellectual cul- 
ture, and the elevation and spotless purity of his 
moral principles, raised him above the temptations 
of sensual indulgence, in which minds of weaker 
mould might have sought a temporary relief His 
soul was steeled against the grosser seductions of ap- 
petite. The only avenue through which his prin- 
ciples could in any way be assailed was the under- 
standing ; and it would appear, from some dark hints 
in his correspondence at this period, that the rash 
ide?a of relieving himself from the w^eight of earthly 
sorrows by some voluntary deed of violence had 
more than once flitted across his mind. It is pleas- 
ing to observe with what beautiful modesty and sim- 
plicity of character he refers his abstinence from 
coarser indulgences to his constitutional infirmities, 
and consequent disinclination to them, which, in 
truth, could be only imputed to the excellence of his 
heart and his understanding. In one of his letters 
he remarks, "that the benevolence of Nature ren- 
dered him, in a manner, an exile from many of the 
temptations that infest the minds of ardent youth. 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 13 

Whatever his wishes might have been, his benevo- 
lent destiny had prevented him from running into 
the frivolities of youth." He ascribes to this cause 
his love of letters, and his predominant anxiety to 
excel in whatever was a glorious subject of compe- 
tition. " Had he been furnished with the nerves and 
muscles of his comrades, it was very far from impos- 
sible that he might have relinquished intellectual 
pleasures. Nature had benevolently rendered him 
incapable of encountering such severe trials." 

Brown's principal resources for dissipating the 
melancholy which hung over him were his inex- 
tinguishable love of letters, and the society of a few 
friends, to whom congeniality of taste and temper had 
United him from early years. In addition to these re- 
sources, we may mention his fondness for pedestri- 
an rambles, which sometimes were of several weeks' 
duration. In the course of these excursions, the cir- 
cle of his acquaintance and friends was gradually 
enlarged. In the city of New- York, in particular, 
he contracted an intimacy with several individuals 
of similar age and kindred mould with himself 
Among these, his earliest associate was Dr. E. H. 
Smith, a young gentleman of great promise in the 
medical profession. Brown had become known to 
him during the residence of the latter as a student 
in Philadelphia. By him our hero was introduced 
to Mr. Dunlap, who has survived to commemorate 
the virtues of his friend in a biography already no- 
ticed, and to Mr. Johnson, the accomplished author 
of the New- York Law Reports. The society of 



14 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

these friends had sufficient attractions to induce him 
to repeat his visit to New- York, until at length, in 
the beginning of 1798, he may be said to have es- 
tablished his permanent residence there, passing 
much of his time under the same roof with them. 
His amiable manners and accompUshments soon rec- 
ommended him to the notice of other eminent indi- 
viduals. He became a member of a literary soci- 
ety, called the Friendly Club, comprehending names 
which have since shed a distinguished lustre over the 
various walks of hterature and science. 

The spirits of Brown seemed to be exalted in this 
new atmosphere. His sensibilities found a grateful 
exercise in the sympathies of friendship, and the pow- 
ers of his mind were called into action by collision 
with others of similar tone with his own. His mem- 
ory was enriched with the stores of various reading, 
hitherto conducted at random, w^ith no higher object 
than temporary amusement, or the gratification of 
an indefinite curiosity. He now concentrated his 
attention on some determinate object, and proposed 
to give full scope to his various talents and acquisi- 
tions in the career of an author, as yet so little trav- 
elled in our own country. 

His first publication was that before noticed, en- 
titled ''Alcuin, a dialogue on the Rights of Women." 
It exhibits the crude and fanciful speculations of a 
theorist, who, in his dreams of optimism, charges 
exclusively on human institutions the imperfections 
necessarily incident to human nature. The work, 
with all its ingenuity, made httle impression on the 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 15 

public : it found few purchasers, and made, it may 
be presumed, still fewer converts. 

He soon after began a romance, which he never 
completed, from which his biographer has given 
copious extracts. It is conducted in the epistolary 
form, and, although exhibiting little of his subse- 
quent power and passion, is recommended by a 
graceful and easy manner of narration, more attract- 
ive than the more elaborate and artificial style of 
his latter novels. 

This abortive attempt was succeeded, in 1798, 
by the publication of Wieland, the first of that re- 
markable series of fictions which flowed in such 
rapid succession from his pen in this and the three 
following years. In this romance, the author, de- 
viating from the usual track of domestic or historic 
incident, proposed to delineate the powerful work- 
ings of passion, displayed by a mind constitutionally 
excitable, under the control of some terrible and 
mysterious agency. The scene is laid in Pennsyl- 
vania. The action takes place in a family by the 
name of Wieland, the principal member of which 
had inherited a melancholy and somewhat super- 
stitious constitution of mind, which his habitual 
reading and contemplation deepened into a calm 
but steady fanaticism. This temper is nourished 
still farther by the occurrence of certain inexplica- 
ble circumstances of ominous import. Strange 
voices are heard by different members of the family, 
sometimes warning them of danger, sometimes an- 
nouncing events seeming beyond the reach of \m- 



16 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

man knowledge. The still and solemn hours of 
night are disturbed by the unearthly summons. 
The other actors of the drama are thrown into 
strange perplexity, and an underplot of events is 
curiously entangled by the occurrence of unaccount- 
able sights as well as sounds. By the heated fancy 
of Wieland they are referred to supernatural agency. 
A fearful destiny seems to preside over the scene, 
and to carry the actors onw ard to some awful ca- 
tastrophe. At length the hour arrives. A solemn, 
mysterious voice announces to Wieland that he is 
now called on to testify his submission to the Di- 
vine will by the sacrifice of his earthly affections — 
to surrender up the affectionate partner of his bo- 
som, on whom he had reposed all his hopes of 
happiness in this life. He obeys the mandate of 
^eaven. The stormy conflict of passion into which 
his mind is thrown, as the fearful sacrifice he is 
about to make calls up all the tender remembrances 
of conjugal fidelity and love, is painted with fright- 
ful strength of colouring. Although it presents, on 
the whole, as pertinent an example as we could 
offer from any of Brown's writings of the peculiar 
power and vividness of his conceptions, the w^hole 
scene is too long for insertion here. We will mu- 
tilate it, how^ever, by a brief extract, as an illustra- 
tion of our author's manner, more satisfactory than 
any criticism can be. Wieland, after receiving the 
fatal mandate, is represented in an apartment alone 
with his wife. His courage, or, rather, his despera- 
tion, fails him, and he sends her, on some pretext, 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 17 

from the chamber. An interval, during which his 
insane passions have time to rally, ensues. 

" She returned w^ith a Hght ; I led the way to the 
chamber ; she looked round her ; she lifted the cur- 
tain of the bed; she saw nothing. At length she 
fixed inquiring eyes upon me. The light now en- 
abled her to discover in my visage what darkness 
had hitherto concealed. Her cares were now trans- 
ferred from my sister to myself, and she said, in a 
tremulous voice, 'Wieland! you are not well; what 
ails you? Can I do nothing for you?' That accents 
and looks so winning should disarm me of my resolu- 
tion was to be expected. My thoughts were thrown 
anew into anarchy. I spread my hand before my 
eyes that I might not see her, and answered only 
by groans. She took my other hand between hers, 
and, pressing it to her heart, spoke with that voice 
which had ever swayed my will and wafted away 
sorrow. ' My friend ! my soul's friend ! tell me thy 
cause of grief. Do I not merit to partake with 
thee in thy cares 1 Am I not thy wife V 

" This was too much. I broke from her em- 
brace, and retired to a corner of the room. In this 
pause, courage was once more infused into me. I 
resolved to execute my duty. She followed me, 
and renewed her passionate entreaty to know the 
cause of my distress. 

" I raised my head and regarded her with stead- 
fast looks. I muttered something about death, and 
the injunctions of my duty. At these words she 
shrunk back, and looked at me with a new expres- 

C 



18 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

sion of anguish. After a pause, she clasped her 
hands and exclaimed, 

"'O Wieland! Wieland ! God grant that I am 
mistaken ; but surely something is wrong. I see it ; 
it is too plain ; thou art undone — lost to me and to 
thyself At the same time she gazed on my fea- 
tures with intensest anxiety, in hope that different 
symptoms would take place. I replied with vehe- 
mence, ' Undone ! No ; my duty is known, and I 
thank my God that my cowardice is now vanquish- 
ed, and I have power to fulfil it. Catharine ! I pity 
the weakness of nature ; I pity thee, but must not 
spare. Thy life is claimed from my hands : thou 
must die !' 

" Fear was now added to her grief. * What 
mean you 1 Why talk you of death 1 Bethink 
yourself, Wieland ; bethink yourself, and this fit will 
pass. ! why came I hither 1 Why did you drag 
me hither V 

"*I brought thee hither to fulfil a divine command. 
I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I 
must.' Saying this, I seized her wrists. She shriek- 
ed aloud, and endeavoured to free herself from my 
grasp, but her efforts were vain. 

" ' Surely, surely, Wieland, thou dost not mean it. 
Am I not thy wife 1 and wouldst thou kill me ? 
Thou wilt not ; and yet — I see — thou art Wieland 
no longer ! A fury, resistless and horrible, possesses 
thee : spare me — spare — help — help — ' 

" Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for 
help — for mercy. When she could speak no longer, 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 19 

her gestures, her looks appealed to my compassion. 
My accursed hand was h-resolute and tremulous. 
I meant thy death to be sudden, thy struggles to be 
brief. Alas ! my heart was infirm, my resolves mu- 
table. Thrice I slackened my grasp, and life kept 
its hold, though in the midst of pangs. Her eye- 
balls started from their sockets. Grimness and dis- 
tortion took place of all that used to bewitch me 
into transport and subdue me into reverence. 

" I was commissioned to kill thee, but not to tor- 
ment thee with the foresight of thy death ; not to 
multiply thy fears and prolong thy agonies. Hag- 
gard, and pale, and lifeless, at length thou ceasedst 
to contend with thy destiny. 

" This was a moment of triumph. Thus had I 
successfully subdued the stubbornness of human 
passions ; the victim which had been demanded 
was given ; the deed was done past recall. 

" I lifted the corpse in my arms, and laid it on 
the bed. I gazed upon it with dehght. Such was 
the elation of my thoughts that I even broke into 
laughter. I clapped my hands, and exclaimed, * It 
is done ! My sacred duty is fulfilled ! To that 1 
have sacrified, my God ! thy last and best gift, 
my wife !' 

" For a while I thus soared above frailty. I 
imagined I had set myself forever beyond the reach 
of selfishness, but my imaginations were false. This 
rapture quickly subsided. I looked again at my 
wife. My joyous ebullitions vanished, and I asked 
myself who it was whom I saw. Methought it 



20 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

could not be Catharine. It could not be the wom- 
an who had lodged for years in my heart ; who had 
slept nightly in my bosom ; who had borne in her 
womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings 
who called me father ; whom I had watched with 
delight, and cherished with a fondness ever new 
and perpetually growing : it could not be the 
same. 

" Where was her bloom 1 These deadly and 
blood-suifused orbs but ill resemble the azure and 
ecstatic tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream 
that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love 
that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much 
unlike these livid stains and this hideous deformity. 
Alas ! these were the traces of agony : the gripe of 
the assassin had been here ! 

" I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate 
and outrageous sorrow. The breath of Heaven that 
sustained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into 7nere 
man, I leaped from the floor ; I dashed my head 
against the wall ; I uttered screams of horror ; I 
panted after torment and pain. Eternal fire and 
the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, 
were music and a bed of roses. 

" I thank my God that this degeneracy was tran- 
sient — that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. 
1 thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to 
duty, and was calm. My wife was dead ; but I re- 
flected that, though this source of human consola- 
tion was closed, yet others were still open. If the 
transports of a husband were no more, the feelings 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 21 

of a father had still scope for exercise. When re- 
membrance of their mother should excite too keen 
a pang, I would look upon them and he comforted, 

" While I revolved these ideas, new warmth 
flowed in upon my heart. I was wrong. These 
feelings were the growth of selfishness. Of this I 
was not aware ; and, to dispel the mist that ob- 
scured my perceptions, a new effulgence and a new 
mandate were necessary. 

" From these thoughts I was recalled by a ray 
that was shot into the room. A voice spake like 
that which I had before heard, ' Thou hast done 
well; but all is not done — the sacrifice is incom- 
plete — thy children must be offered — they must 
perish with their mother! '" 

This, too, is accomplished by the same remorse- 
less arm, although the author has judiciously re- 
frained from attempting to prolong the note of 
feeling, struck with so powerful a hand, by the re- 
cital of the particulars. The wretched fanatic is 
brought to trial for the murder, but is acquitted on 
the ground of insanity. The illusion which has 
bewildered him at length breaks on his understand- 
ing in its whole truth. He cannot sustain the 
shock, and the tragic tale closes with the suicide of 
the victim of superstition and imposture. The key 
to the whole of this mysterious agency which con- 
trols the circumstances of the story is — ventrilo- 
quism ! ventriloquism exerted for the very purpose 
by a human fiend, from no motives of revenge or 
hatred, but pure diabolical maUce, or, as he would 



22 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

make us believe, and the author seems wilUng to 
endorse this absurd version of it, as a mere practi- 
cal joke ! The reader, w^ho has been gorged with 
this feast of horrors, is tempted to throw away the 
book in disgust at finding himself the dupe of such 
paltry jugglery ; which, whatever sense be given to 
the term ventriloquism, is altogether incompetent to 
the various phenomena of sight and sound with 
which the story is so plentifully seasoned. We can 
feel the force of Dryden's imprecation, when he 
cursed the inventors of those fifth acts which are 
bound to unravel all the fine mesh of impossibilities 
which the author's wits had been so busy entan- 
gling in the four preceding. 

The explication of the mysteries of Wieland 
naturally suggests the question how far an author 
is bound to explain the supernaturalities, if we may 
so call them, of his fictions ; and whether it is not 
better, on the whole, to trust to the willing super- 
stition and credulity of the reader (of which there is 
perhaps store enough in almost every bosom, at the 
present enlightened day even, for poetical purposes) 
than to attempt a solution on purely natural or me- 
chanical principles. It was thought no harm for the 
ancients to bring the use of machinery into their 
epics, and a similar freedom was conceded to the 
old English dramatists, whose ghosts and witches 
were placed in the much more perilous predicament 
of being subjected to the scrutiny of the spectator, 
whose senses are not near so likely to be duped as 
the sensitive and excited imagination of the reader 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 23 

in his solitary chamber. It must be admitted, how- 
ever, that the pubHc of those days, when the 

" Undoubting mind 
Believed the magic wonders that were sung," 

were admirably seasoned for the action of super- 
stition in all forms, and furnished, therefore, a most 
enviable audience for the melo-dramatic artist, 
whether dramatist or romance-writer. But all this 
is changed. No witches ride the air nowadays, 
and fairies no longer " dance their rounds by the 
pale moonlight," as the worthy Bishop Corbet, in- 
deed, lamented a century and a half ago. 

Still it may be allowed, perhaps, if the scene is laid 
in some remote age or country, to borrow the ancient 
superstitions of the place, and incorporate them into, 
or, at least, colour the story with them, without shock- 
ing the wellbred prejudices of the modern reader. 
Sir Walter Scott has done this with good effect in 
more than one of his romances, as every one will 
readily call to mind. A fine example occurs in the 
Boden Glass apparition in Waverley, which the 
great novelist, far from attempting to explain on 
any philosophical principles, or even by an intima- 
tion of its being the mere creation of a feverish 
imagination, has left as he found it, trusting that 
the reader's poetic feeling will readily accommo- 
date itself to the popular superstitions of the coun- 
try he is depicting. This reserve on his part, in- 
deed, arising from a truly poetic view of the subject, 
and an honest reliance on a similar spirit in his 
reader, has laid him open, with some matter-of-fact 



24 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

people, to the imputation of not being wholly un- 
touched himself by the national superstitions. Yet 
how much would the whole scene have lost in its 
permanent effect if the author had attempted an 
explanation of the apparition on the ground of an 
optical illusion not infrequent among the mountain 
mists of the Highlands, or any other of the ingenious 
solutions so readily at the command of the thorough- 
bred story-teller ! 

It must be acknowledged, however, that this way 
of solving the riddles of romance would hardly be 
admissible in a story drawn from famiUar scenes 
and situations in modern life, and especially in our 
own country. The lights of education are flung 
too bright and broad over the land to allow any 
lurking-hole for the shadows of a twilight age. So 
much the worse for the poet and the novelist. 
Their province must now be confined to poor hu- 
man nature, without meddling with the " Gorgons 
and chimeras dire" which floated through the be- 
wildered brains of our forefathers, at least on the 
other side of the water. At any rate, if a writer, 
in this broad sunshine, ventures on any sort of dia- 
Uerie, he is forced to explain it by all the thousand 
contrivances of trapdoors, secret passages, waxen 
images, and other makeshifts from the property- 
room of Mrs. Radclifle and Company. 

Brown, indeed, has resorted to a somewhat higher 
mode of elucidating his mysteries by a remarkable 
phenomenon of our nature. But the misfortune of 
all these attempts to account for the marvels of the 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 25 

Story by natural or mechanical causes is, that they 
are very seldom satisfactory, or competent to their 
object. This is eminently the case with the ven- 
triloquism in Wieland. Even w^here they are com- 
petent, it may be doubted whether the reader, who 
has suffered his credulous fancy to be entranced by 
the spell of the magician, will be gratified to learn, 
at the end, by what cheap mechanical contrivance 
he has been duped. However this may be, it is 
certain that a very unfavourable effect, in another 
respect, is produced on his mind, after he is made 
acquainted with the nature of the secret spring by 
which the machinery is played, more especially 
when one leading circumstance, like ventriloquism 
in Wieland, is made the master-key, as it were, by 
which all the mysteries are to be unlocked and 
opened at once. With this explanation at hand, it 
is extremely difficult to rise to that sensation of 
mysterious awe and apprehension on which so 
much of the sublimity and general effect of the nar- 
rative necessarily depends. Instead of such feel- 
ings, the only ones which can enable us to do full 
justice to the author's conceptions, we sometimes, 
on the contrary, may detect a smile lurking in the 
corner of the mouth as we peruse scenes of posi- 
tive power, from the contrast obviously suggested 
of the impotence of the apparatus and the porten- 
tous character of the results. The critic, therefore, 
possessed of the real key to the mysteries of the 
story, if he would do justice to his author's merits, 
must divest himself, as it were, of his previous 

D 



26 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

knowledge, by fastening his attention on the re- 
suks, to the exclusion of the insignificant means by 
which they are achieved. He will not always find 
this an easy matter. 

But to return fi'om this rambling digression : in 
the following year, 1799, Brown published his sec- 
ond novel, entitled Ormond. The story presents 
few of the deeply agitating scenes and powerful 
bursts of passion which distinguish the first. It is 
designed to exhibit a model of surpassing excellence 
in a female rising superior to all the shocks of ad- 
versity and the more perilous blandishments of se- 
duction, and who, as the scene grows darker and 
darker around her, seems to illumine the whole 
with the radiance of her celestial virtues. The 
reader is reminded of the "patient Griselda," so 
dehcately portrayed by the pencils of Boccaccio 
and Chaucer. It must be admitted, however, that 
the contemplation of such a character in the abstract 
is more imposing than the minute details by which 
we attain to the knowledge of it ; and although 
there is nothing, w^e are told, which the gods look- 
ed down upon with more satisfaction than a brave 
mind strugghng with the storms of adversity, yet, 
when these come in the guise of poverty and all the 
train of teasing annoyances in domestic life, the tale, 
if long protracted, too often produces a sensation of 
weariness scarcely to be compensated by the moral 
grandeur of the spectacle. 

The appearance of these two novels constitutes 
an epoch in the ornamental literature of America. 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 27 

They are the first decidedly successful attempts in 
the walk of romantic fiction. They are still farther 
remarkable as illustrating the character and state 
of society on this side of the Atlantic, instead of 
resorting to the exhausted springs of European in- 
vention. These circumstances, as well as the un- 
common powers they displayed both of conception 
and execution, recommended them to the notice 
of the literary world, although their philosophical 
method of dissecting passion and analyzing motives 
of action placed them somewhat beyond the reach 
of vulgar popularity. Brown was sensible of the 
favourable impression which he had made, and men- 
tions it in one of his epistles to his brother with his 
usual unaffected modesty : "I add somewhat, though 
not so much as I might if I were so inclined, to the 
number of my friends. I find to be the writer of 
Wieland and Ormond is a greater recommendation 
than I ever imagined it would be." 

In the course of the same year, the quiet tenour 
of his life was interrupted by the visitation of that 
fearful pestilence, the yellow fever, which had for 
several successive years made its appearance in the 
city of New- York, but which in 1798 fell upon it 
with a violence similar to that with which it had 
desolated Philadelphia in 1793. Brown had taken 
the precaution of withdrawing from the latter city, 
where he then resided, on its first appearance there. 
He prolonged his stay in New- York, however, re- 
lying on the healthiness of the quarter of the town 
where he lived, and the habitual abstemiousness of 



28 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

his diet. His friend Smith was necessarily detain- 
ed there by the duties of his profession ; and Brown, 
in answer to the reiterated importunities of his ab- 
sent relatives to withdraw from the infected city, 
refused to do so, on the ground that his personal 
services might be required by the friends who re- 
mained in it ; a disinterestedness well meriting the 
strength of attachment which he excited in the 
bosom of his companions. 

Unhappily, Brown was right in his prognostics, 
and his services were too soon required in behalf 
of his friend Dr. Smith, who fell a victim to his 
own benevolence, having caught the fatal malady 
from an Italian gentleman, a stranger in the city, 
whom he received, when infected with the disease, 
into his house, relinquishing to him his own apart- 
ment. Brown had the melancholy satisfaction of 
performing the last sad offices of affection to his 
dying friend. He himself soon became affected 
with the same disorder ; and it was not till after a 
severe illness that he so far recovered as to be able 
to transfer his residence to Perth Amboy, the abode 
of Mr. Dunlap, where a pure and invigorating at- 
mosphere, aided by the kind attentions of his host, 
gradually restored him to a sufficient degree of 
health and spirits for the prosecution of his hterary 
labours. 

The spectacle he had witnessed made too deep 
an impression on him to be readily effaced, and he 
resolved to transfer his own conceptions of it, while 
yet fresh, to the page of fiction, or, as it might 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 29 

rather be called, of history, for the purpose, as he 
intimates in his preface, of imparting to others some 
of the fruits of the melancholy lesson he had him- 
self experienced. Such was the origin of his next 
novel, Arthur Mervyn ; or, Memoirs of the Year 
1793. This was the fatal year of the yellow fever 
in Philadelphia. The action of the story is chiefly 
confined to that city, but seems to be prepared with 
little contrivance, on no regular or systematic plan, 
consisting simply of a succession of incidents, hav- 
ing little cohesion except in reference to the hero, 
but affording situations of great interest, and fright- 
ful fidelity of colouring. The pestilence wasting a 
thriving and populous city has furnished a topic for 
more than one great master. It will be remember- 
ed as the terror of every schoolboy in the pages 
of Thucydides ; it forms the gloomy portal to the 
light and airy fictions of Boccaccio ; and it has fur- 
nished a subject for the graphic pencil of the Eng- 
Hsh novelist De Foe, the only one of the three who 
never witnessed the horrors which he paints, but 
whose fictions wear an aspect of reality which his- 
tory can rarely reach. 

Brown has succeeded in giving the same terribly 
distinctness to his impressions by means of indi- 
vidual portraiture. He has, however, not confined 
himself to this, but, by a variety of touches, lays 
open to our view the whole interior of the city of 
the plague. Instead of expatiating on the loathsome 
symptoms and physical ravages of the disease, he 
selects the most striking moral circumstances which 



30 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

attend it; he dwells on the withering sensation 
that falls so heavily on the heart in the streets of 
the once busy and crowded city, now deserted and 
silent, save only where the wheels of the melan- 
choly hearse are heard to rumble along the pave- 
ment. Our author not unfrequently succeeds in 
conveying more to the heart by the skilful selection 
of a single circumstance than v^ould have flowed 
from a multitude of petty details. It is the art of 
the great masters of poetry and painting. 

The same year in which Brown produced the 
first part of "Arthur Mervyn," he entered on the 
publication of a periodical entitled The Monthly 
Magazine and Ainerican Review, a work that, da- 
ring its brief existence, which terminated in the 
following year, afforded abundant evidence of its 
editor's versatility of talent and the ample range of 
his literary acquisitions. Our hero was now fairly 
in the traces of authorship. He looked to it as his 
permanent vocation ; and the indefatigable diligence 
with which he devoted himself to it may at least 
serve to show that he did not shrink from his pro- 
fessional engagements from any lack of industry or 
enterprise. 

The publication of "Arthur Mervyn" was suc- 
ceeded not long after by that of Edgar Huntly ; 
or, the Adventures of a Sleepivalker, a romance pre- 
senting a greater variety of wild and picturesque 
adventure, with more copious delineations of natu- 
ral scenery, than is to be found in his other fictions; 
circumstances, no doubt, possessing more attractions 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 31 

for the mass of readers than the peculiarities of his 
other novels. Indeed, the author has succeeded 
perfectly in constantly stimulating the curiosity by a 
succession of as original incidents, perils, and hair- 
breadth escapes as ever flitted across a poet's fancy. 
It is no small triumph of the art to be able to main- 
tain the curiosity of the reader unflagging through 
a succession of incidents, w^hich, far from being 
sustained by one predominant passion, and forming 
parts of one whole, rely each for its interest on its 
own independent merits. 

The story is laid in the western part of Pennsyl- 
vania, where the author has diversified his descrip- 
tions of a simple and almost primitive state of society 
with uncommonly animated sketches of rural sce- 
nery. It is worth observing how the sombre com- 
plexion of Brown's imagination, which so deeply 
tinges his moral portraiture, sheds its gloom over 
his pictures of material nature, raising the land- 
scape into all the severe and savage sublimity of a 
Salvator Rosa. The somnambulism of this novel, 
which, like the ventriloquism of " Wieland," is the 
moving principle of all the machinery, has this ad- 
vantage over the latter, that it does not necessarily 
impair the eflect by perpetually suggesting a solu- 
tion of mysteries, and thus dispelling the illusion 
on whose existence the eflect of the whole story 
mainly depends. The adventures, indeed, built 
upon it are not the most probable in the world ; 
but, waving this — we shall be well rewarded for 
such concession — there is no farther difficulty. 



32 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

The extract already cited by us from the first of 
our author's novels has furnished the reader with 
an illustration of his power in displaying the con- 
flict of passion under high moral excitement. We 
will now venture another quotation from the work 
before us, in order to exhibit more fully his talent 
for the description of external objects. 

Edgar Huntly, the hero of the story, is repre- 
sented in one of the wild mountain fastnesses of 
Norwalk, a district in the western part of Penn- 
sylvania. He is on the brink of a ravine, from 
which the only avenue lies over the body of a 
tree thrown across the chasm, through whose dark 
depths below a rushing torrent is heard to pour its 
waters. 

" While occupied with these reflections, my eyes 
were fixed upon the opposite steeps. The tops of 
the trees, waving to and fro in the wildest commo- 
tion, and their trunks occasionally bending to the 
blast, which, in these lofty regions, blew with a 
violence unknown in the tracts below, exhibited an 
awful spectacle. At length my attention was at- 
tracted by the trunk which lay across the gulf, and 
which I had converted into a bridge. I perceived 
that it had already swerved somewhat from its 
original position ; that every blast broke or loosened 
some of the fibres by which its roots were connect- 
ed with the opposite bank; and that, if the storm 
did not speedily abate, there was imminent danger 
of its being torn from the rock and precipitated into 
the chasm. Thus my retreat would be cut ofl', and 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 33 

the evils from which I was endeavouring to rescue 
another would be experienced by myself. 

" I believed my destiny to hang upon the expe- 
dition with which I should recross this gulf The 
moments that were spent in these deliberations 
were critical, and I shuddered to observe that the 
trunk was held in its place by one or two fibres, 
which were already stretched almost to breaking. 

" To pass along the trunk, rendered slippery by 
the wet, and unsteadfast by the wind, was eminent- 
ly dangerous. To maintain my hold in passing, in 
defiance of the whirlwind, required the most vigor- 
ous exertions. For this end, it was necessary to 
discommode myself of my cloak, and of the volume 
which I carried in the pocket of my coat. 

" Just as I had disposed of these encumbrances, 
and had risen from my seat, my attention was again 
called to the opposite steep by the most unwelcome 
object that at this time could possibly occur. Some- 
thing was perceived moving among the bushes and 
rocks, which, for a time, I hoped was nothing more 
than a racoon or opossum, but which presently 
appeared to be a panther. His gray coat, extended 
claws, fiery eyes, and a cry which he at that mo- 
ment uttered, and w^hich, by its resemblance to the 
human voice, is peculiarly terrific, denoted him to 
be the most ferocious and untameable of that de- 
tested race. The industry of our hunters has nearly 
banished animals of prey from these precincts. 
The fastnesses of Norwalk, however, could not but 
afford refuge to some of them. Of late I had met 

E 



34 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

them so rarely that my fears were seldom alive, 
and I trod without caution the ruggedest and most 
solitary haunts. Still, however, I had seldom been 
unfurnished in my rambles with the means of de- 
fence. 

" The unfrequency with which I had lately en- 
countered this foe, and the encumbrance of provis- 
ion, made me neglect, on this occasion, to bring 
with me my usual arms. The beast that was now 
before me, when stimulated by hunger, was accus- 
tomed to assail whatever could provide him with a 
banquet of blood. He would set upon the man and 
the deer with equal and irresistible ferocity. His 
sagacity was equal to his strength, and he seemed 
able to discover when his antagonist was armed 
and prepared for defence. 

" My past experience enabled me to estimate the 
full extent of my danger. He sat on the brow of 
the steep, eyeing the bridge, and apparently delib- 
erating whether he should cross it. It was proba- 
ble that he had scented my footsteps thus far, and, 
should he pass over, his vigilance could scarcely fail 
of detecting my asylum. 

" Should he retain his present station, my danger 
was scarcely lessened. To pass over in the face 
of a famished tiger was only to rush upon my fate. 
The falling of the trunk, which had lately been so 
anxiously deprecated, was now, with no less solici- 
tude, desired. Every new gust, I hoped, would tear 
asunder its remaining bands, and, by cutting off all 
communication between the opposite steeps, place 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 35 

me in security. My hopes, however, were destined 
to be frustrated. The fibres of the prostrate tree 
were obstinately tenacious of their hold, and pres- 
ently the animal scrambled down the rock and pro- 
ceeded to cross it. 

" Of all kinds of death, that which now menaced 
me was the most abhorred. To die by disease, or 
by the hand of a fellow-creature, was propitious 
and lenient in comparison with being rent to pieces 
by the fangs of this savage. To perish in this ob- 
scure retreat by means so impervious to the anxious 
curiosity of my friends, to lose my portion of exist- 
ence by so untoward and ignoble a destiny, was 
insupportable. I bitterly deplored my rashness in 
coming hither unprovided for an encounter like 
this. 

" The evil of my present circumstances consisted 
chiefly in suspense. My death was unavoidable, 
but my imagination had leisure to torment itself by 
anticipations. One foot of the savage was slowly 
and cautiously moved after the other. He struck 
his claws so deeply into the bark that they were 
with difficulty withdrawn. At length he leaped 
upon the ground. We were now separated by an 
interval of scarcely eight feet. To leave the spot 
where I crouched was impossible. Behind and be- 
side me the cliff rose perpendicularly, and before me 
was this grim and terrible visage. I shrunk still 
closer to the ground, and closed my eyes. 

" From this pause of horror I was aroused by the 
noise occasioned by a second spring of the animal. 



36 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

He leaped into the pit, in which I had so deeply 
regretted that I had not taken refuge, and disap- 
peared. My rescue was so sudden, and so much 
beyond my belief or my hope, that I doubted for a 
moment whether my senses did not deceive me. 
This opportunity of escape was not to be neglected. 
I left my place and scrambled over the trunk with 
a precipitation which had like to have proved fatal. 
The tree groaned and shook under me, the wind 
blew with unexampled violence, and I had scarcely 
reached the opposite steep when the roots were 
severed from the rock, and the whole fell thunder- 
ing to the bottom of the chasm. 

" My trepidations were not speedily quieted. I 
looked back with wonder on my hair-breadth es- 
cape, and on that singular concurrence of events 
which had placed me in so short a period in abso- 
lute security. Had the trunk fallen a moment ear- 
her, I should have been imprisoned on the hill or 
thrown headlong. Had its fall been delayed an- 
other moment, I should have been pm-sued ; for the 
beast now issued from his den, and testified his sur- 
prise and disappointment by tokens the sight of 
which made my blood run cold. 

" He saw me, and hastened to the verge of the 
chasm. He squatted on his hind legs, and assumed 
the attitude of one preparing to leap. My conster- 
nation was excited afresh by these appearances. It 
seemed at first as if the rift was too wide for any 
power of muscles to carry him in safety over ; but 
I knew the unparalleled agility of this animal, and 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 37 

that his experience had made him a better judge of 
the practicabihty of this exploit than I was. 

" Still there was hope that he would relinquish 
this design as desperate. This hope was quickly 
at an end. He sprung, and his fore legs touched 
the verge of the rock on which I stood. In spite 
of vehement exertions, however, the surface was too 
smooth and too hard to allow him to make good 
his hold. He fell, and a piercing cry uttered below 
showed that nothing had obstructed his descent to 
the bottom." 

The subsequent narrative leads the hero through 
a variety of romantic adventures, especially with 
the savages, with whom he has several desperate 
rencounters and critical escapes. The track of ad- 
venture, indeed, strikes into the same wild solitudes 
of the forest that have since been so frequently 
travelled over by our ingenious countryman Cooper. 
The light in which the character of the North 
American Indian has been exhibited by the two 
writers has little resemblance. Brown's sketches, 
it is true, are few and faint. As far as they go, 
however, they are confined to such views as are 
most conformable to the popular conceptions, bring- 
ing into full relief the rude and uncouth lineaments 
of the Indian character, its cunning, cruelty, and 
unmitigated ferocity, with no intimations of a more 
generous nature. Cooper, on the other hand, dis- 
cards all the coarser elements of savage life, reserv- 
ing those only of a picturesque and romantic cast, 
and elevating the souls of his warriors by such sen- 



38 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

timents of courtesy, high-toned gallantry, and pas- 
sionate tenderness as belong to the riper period of 
civiHzation. Thus idealized, the portrait, if not 
strictly that of the fierce and untamed son of the 
forest, is at least sufficiently true for poetical pur- 
poses. Cooper is indeed a poet. His descriptions 
of inanimate nature, no less than of savage man, 
are instinct with the breath of poetry. Witness 
his infinitely various pictures of the ocean ; or still 
more, of the beautiful spirit that rides upon its bo- 
som, the gallant ship, which under his touches 
becomes an animated thing, inspired by a living 
soul ; reminding us of the beautiful superstition of 
the simple-hearted natives, who fancied the bark of 
Columbus some celestial visitant, descending on his 
broad pinions from the skies. 

Brown is far less of a colourist He deals less 
in external nature, but searches the depths of the 
soul. He may be rather called a philosophical than 
a poetical writer ; for, though he has that intensity 
of feeling which constitutes one of the distinguish- 
ing attributes of the latter, yet in his most tumultu- 
ous bursts of passion we frequently find him paus- 
ing to analyze and coolly speculate on the elements 
which have raised it. This intrusion, indeed, of 
reason, la raison froide, into scenes of the greatest 
interest and emotion, has sometimes the unhappy 
effect of chilling them altogether. 

In 1800 Brown published the second part of his 
Arthur Mervyn, whose occasional displays of en- 
ergy and pathos by no means compensate the vio- 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 39 

lent dislocations and general improbabilities of the 
narrative. Our author was led into these defects 
by the unpardonable precipitancy of his composi- 
tion. Three of his romances were thrown off in 
the course of one year. These were written with 
the printer's devil literally at his elbow, one being 
begun before another was completed, and all of 
them before a regular, well-digested plan was de- 
vised for their execution. 

The consequences of this curious style of doing 
business are such as might have been predicted. 
The incidents are strung together with about as 
little connexion as the rhymes in " the House that 
Jack built;" and the whole reminds us of some 
bizarre, antiquated edifice, exhibiting a dozen styles 
of architecture, according to the caprice or conve- 
nience of its successive owners. 

The reader is ever at a loss for a clew to guide 
him through the labyrinth of strange, incongruous 
incident. It would seem as if the great object of 
the author was to keep alive the state of suspense, 
on the player's principle, in the " Rehearsal," that 
" on the stage it is best to keep the audience in sus- 
pense ; for to guess presently at the plot or the 
sense tires them at the end of the first act. Now 
here every line surprises you, and brings in new 
matter !" Perhaps, however, all this proceeds less 
from calculation than from the embarrassment 
which the novelist feels in attempting a solution of 
his own riddles, and which leads him to put ofi' the 
reader, by multiplying incident after incident, until 



40 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

at length, entangled in the complicated snarl of his 
own intrigue, he is finally obliged, when the fatal 
hour arrives, to cut the knot which he cannot un- 
ravel. There is no other way by which we can 
account for the forced and violent denouemens which 
bring up so many of Brown's fictions. Voltaire has 
remarked, somewhere in his Commentaries on Cor- 
neille, that " an author may write with the rapidity 
of genius, but should correct with scrupulous delib- 
eration." Our author seems to have thought it suf- 
ficient to comply with the first half of the maxim. 

In 1801 Brown published his novel of Clara 
Hoivard, and in 1804 closed the series with Jane 
Talbot, first printed in England. They are com- 
posed in a more subdued tone, discarding those 
startling preternatural incidents of which he had 
made such free use in his former fictions. In the 
preface to his first romance, " Wieland," he remarks, 
in allusion to the mystery on which the story is 
made to depend, that " it is a sufficient vindication 
of the writer if history furnishes one parallel fact." 
But the French critic, who tells us le vrai pent quel- 
quefois riUre pas vraisemUahle, has, with more judg- 
ment, condemned this vicious recurrence to extrav- 
agant and improbable incident. Truth cannot al- 
ways be pleaded in vindication of the author of a 
fiction any more than of a libel. Brown seems to 
have subsequently come into the same opinion ; for, 
in a letter addressed to his brother James, after the 
publication of '' Edgar Huntly," he observes, " Your 
remarks upon the gloominess and out-of-nature in- 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 41 

cidents of ' Huntly/ if they be not just in their full 
extent, are doubtless such as most readers will 
make, which alone is a sufficient reason for drop- 
ping the doleful tone and assuming a cheerful one, 
or, at least, substituting moral causes and daily inci- 
dents in place of the prodigious or the singular. I 
shall not fall hereafter into that strain." The two 
last novels of our author, however, although purified 
from the more glaring defects of the preceding, were 
so inferior in their general power and originality of 
conception, that they never rose to the same level 
in public favour. 

In the year 1801 Brown returned to his native 
city, Philadelphia, where he established his resi- 
dence in the family of his brother. Here he con- 
tinued, steadily pursuing his literary avocations ; 
and in 1803 undertook the conduct of a periodical, 
entitled The Literary Magazine and American Re- 
gister. A great change had taken place in his opin- 
ions on more than one important topic connected 
with human life and happiness, and, indeed, in his 
general tone of thinking, since abandoning his pro- 
fessional career. Brighter prospects, no doubt, sug- 
gested to him more cheerful considerations. In- 
stead of a mere dreamer in the world of fancy, he 
had now become a practical man : larger experi- 
ence and deeper meditation had shown him the 
emptiness of his Utopian theories ; and, though his 
sensibilities were as ardent, and as easily enlisted 
as ever in the cause of humanity, his schemes of 
amelioration were built upon, not against the exist- 

F 



42 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ing institutions of society. The enunciation of the 
principles on which the periodical above alluded to 
was to be conducted, is so honourable every way 
to his heart and his understanding that we cannot 
refrain from making a brief extract from it. 

" In an age like this, when the foundations of 
religion and morality have been so boldly attacked, 
it seems necessary, in announcing a work of this 
nature, to be particularly explicit as to the path 
which the editor means to pursue. He therefore 
avows himself to be, without equivocation or re- 
serve, the ardent friend and the willing champion 
of the Christian religion. Christian piety he reveres 
as the highest excellence of human beings ; and the 
amplest reward he can seek for his labour is the 
consciousness of having, in some degree, however 
inconsiderable, contributed to recommend the prac- 
tice of religious duties. As in the conduct of this 
work a supreme regard will be paid to the interests 
of religion and morality, he will scrupulously guard 
against all that dishonours and impairs that princi- 
ple. Everything that savours of indelicacy or licen- 
tiousness will be rigorously proscribed. His poet- 
ical pieces may be dull, but they shall at least be 
free from voluptuousness or sensuality ; and his 
prose, whether seconded or not by genius and 
knowledge, shall scrupulously aim at the promotion 
of public and private virtue." 

During his abode in New- York our author had 
formed an attachment to an amiable and accom- 
plished young lady. Miss Ehzabeth Linn, daughter 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 43 

of the excellent and highly-gifted Presbyterian di- 
vine, Dr. William Linn, of that city. Their mu- 
tual attachment, in which the impulses of the heart 
were sanctioned by the understanding, was followed 
by their marriage in November, 1804, after which 
he never again removed his residence from Phila- 
delphia. 

With the additional responsibiUties of his new 
station, he pursued his literary labours with increased 
diligence. He projected the plan of an Annual 
Register, the first work of the kind in the country, 
and in 1806 edited the first volume of the publica- 
tion, which was undertaken at the risk of an emi- 
nent bookseller of Philadelphia, Mr. Conrad, who 
had engaged his editorial labours in the conduct of 
the former Magazine, begun in 1803. When it is 
considered that both these periodicals were placed 
under the superintendence of one individual, and 
that he bestowed such indefatigable attention on 
them that they were not only prepared, but a large 
portion actually executed by his own hands, we 
shall form no mean opinion of the extent a.nd vari- 
ety of his stores of information and his facility in 
applying them. Both works are replete with evi- 
dences of the taste and erudition of their editor, 
embracing a wide range of miscellaneous articles, 
essays, literary criticism, and scientific researches. 
The historical portion of " The Register" in par- 
ticular, comprehending, in addition to the political 
annals of the principal states of Europe and of our 
own country, an elaborate inquiry into the origin 



44 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

and organization of our domestic institutions, dis- 
plays a discrimination in the selection of incidents, 
and a good faith and candour in the mode of dis- 
cussing them, that entitle it to great authority as a 
record of contemporary transactions. Eight vol- 
umes were pubhshed of the first-mentioned period- 
ical, and the latter was continued under his direc- 
tion till the end of the fifth volume, 1809. 

In addition to these regular, and, as they may 
be called, professional labours, he indulged his pro- 
lific pen in various speculations, both of a literary 
and political character, many of which appeared in 
the pages of the " Portfolio." Among other occa- 
sional productions, we may notice a beautiful bio- 
graphical sketch of his wife's brother. Dr. J. B. 
Linn, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Phila- 
delphia, whose lamented death occurred in the year 
succeeding Brown's marriage. We must not leave 
out of the account three elaborate and extended 
pamphlets, published between 1803 and 1809, on 
political topics of deep interest to the community 
at that time. The first of these, on the cession of 
Louisiana to the French, soon went into a second 
edition. They all excited general attention at the 
time of their appearance by the novelty of their 
arguments, the variety and copiousness of their in- 
formation, the liberality of their views, the independ- 
ence, so rare at that day, of foreign prejudices; the 
exemption, still rarer, from the bitterness of party 
spirit; and, lastly, the tone of loyal and heartfelt 
patriotism — a patriotism without cant — ^with which 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 45 

the author dwells on the expanding glory and pros- 
perity of his country in a strain of prophecy that it 
is our boast has now become history. 

Thus occupied, Brown's situation seemed now 
to afford him all the means for happiness attainable 
in this life. His own labours secured to him an 
honourable independence and a high reputation, 
which, to a mind devoted to professional or other 
intellectual pursuits, is usually of far higher estima- 
tion than gain. Round his own fireside he found 
ample scope for the exercise of his affectionate sen- 
sibilities, while the tranquil pleasures of domestic 
life proved the best possible relaxation for a mind 
wearied by severe intellectual effort. His grateful 
heart was deeply sensible to the extent of his bless- 
ings ; and in more than one letter he indulges in 
a vein of reflection which shows that his only soli- 
citude was from the fear of their instability. His 
own health furnished too well-grounded cause for 
such apprehensions. 

We have already noticed that he set out in life 
with a feeble constitution. His sedentary habits 
and intense application had not, as it may well be 
believed, contributed to repair the defects of Nature. 
He had for some time shown a disposition to pul- 
monary complaints, and had raised blood more than 
once, which he in vain endeavoured to persuade 
himself did not proceed from the lungs. As the 
real character of the disease disclosed itself in a 
manner not to be mistaken, his anxious friends 
would have persuaded him to cross the water in 



46 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the hope of re-estabHshing his health by a season- 
able change of climate. But Brown could not en- 
dure the thoughts of so long a separation from his 
beloved family, and he trusted to the effect of a 
temporary abstinence from business, and of one of 
those excursions into the country by which he had 
so often recruited his health and spirits. 

In the summer of 1809 he made a tour into 
New-Jersey and New- York. A letter addressed to 
one of his family from the banks of the Hudson, 
during this journey, exhibits in melancholy colours 
how large a portion of his life had been clouded by 
disease, which now, indeed, was too oppressive to 
admit of any other alleviation than what he could 
find in the bosom of his own family. 

" My dearest Mary — Instead of wandering 
about, and viewing more nearly a place that affords 
very pleasing landscapes, here am I, hovering over 
the images of wife, children, and sisters. I want 
to w^rite to you and home ; and though unable to 
procure paper enough to form a letter, I cannot 
help saying something even on this scrap. 

" I am mortified to think how incurious and in- 
active a mind has fallen to my lot. I left home 
with reluctance. If I had not brought a beloved 
part of my home along with me, I should probably 
have not left it at all. At a distance from home, 
my enjoyments, my affections are beside you. If 
swayed by mere inclination, I should not be out of 
your company a quarter of an hour between my 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 47 

parting and returning hour; but I have some mercy 
on jou and Susan, and a due conviction of my 
v^ant of power to beguile your vacant hour with 
amusement, or improve it by instruction. Even if 
I were ever so well, and if my spirits did not con- 
tinually hover on the brink of dejection, my talk 
could only make you yawn ; as things are, my com- 
pany can only tend to create a gap indeed. 

" When have I known that lightness and vivacity 
of mind which the divine flow of health, even in 
calamity, produces in some men, and would pro- 
duce in me, no doubt — at least, when not soured 
by misfortune 1 Never ; scarcely ever ; not longer 
than half an hour at a time since I have called my- 
self man, and not a moment since I left you." 

Finding these brief excursions productive of no 
salutary change in his health, he at length complied 
with the entreaties of his friends, and determined 
to try the effect of a voyage to Europe in the fol- 
lowing spring. That spring he was doomed never 
to behold. About the middle of November he was 
taken with a violent pain in his left side, for which 
he was bled. From that time forward he was con- 
fined to his chamber. His malady was not attend- 
ed with the exemption from actual pain with which 
Nature seems sometimes willing to compensate the 
suflerer for the length of its duration. His suffer- 
ings were incessant and acute ; and they were sup- 
ported, not only without a murmur, but with an 
appearance of cheerfulness, to which the hearts of 
his friends could but ill respond. He m.et the ap- 



48 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

proacli of Death in the true spirit of Christian phi- 
losophy. No other dread but that of separation 
from those dear to him on earth had power to dis- 
turb his tranquilKty for a moment. But the tem- 
per of his mind in his last hours is best disclosed 
in a communication from that faithful partner who 
contributed more than any other to support him 
through them. "He always felt for others more 
than for himself; and the evidences of sorrow in 
those around him, which could not at all times be 
suppressed, appeared to affect him more than his 
own sufferings. Whenever he spoke of the proba- 
bihty of a fatal termination to his disease, it was in 
an indirect and covert manner, as, ' you must do so 
and so when I am absent,' or ' when I am asleep/ 
He surrendered not up one faculty of his soul but 
with his last breath. He saw death in every step 
of his approach, and viewed him as a messenger 
that brought with him no terrors. He frequently 
expressed his resignation ; but his resignation was 
not produced by apathy or pain; for while he bowed 
with submission to the Divine will, he felt with the 
keenest sensibility his separation from those who 
made this world but too dear to him. Towards 
the last he spoke of death without disguise, and 
appeared to wish to prepare his friends for the 
event, which he felt to be approaching. A few 
days previous to his change, as sitting up in the 
bed, he fixed his eyes on the sky, and desired not 
to be spoken to until he first spoke. In this posi- 
tion, and with a serene countenance, he continued 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 49 

for some minutes, and then said to his wife, * When 
I desired you not to speak to me, I had the most 
transporting and subhme feehngs I have ever expe- 
rienced ; I wanted to enjoy them, and know how 
long they would last;' concluding with requesting 
her to remember the circumstance." 

A visible change took place in him on the morn- 
ing of the 19th of February, 1810, and he caused 
his family to be assembled around his bed, when he 
took leave of each one of them in the most tender 
and impressive manner. He lingered, however, a 
few days longer, remaining in the full possession of 
his faculties to the 22d of the month, when he ex- 
pired without a struggle. He had reached the thir- 
ty-ninth year of his age the month preceding his 
death. The family which he left consisted of a 
wife and four children. 

There was nothing striking in Brown's personal 
appearance. His manners, however, were distin- 
guished by a gentleness and unaffected simplicity 
which rendered them extremely agreeable. He pos- 
sessed colloquial powers which do not always fall 
to the lot of the practised and ready writer. His 
rich and various acquisitions supplied an unfailing 
fund for the edification of his hearers. They did 
not lead him, however, to affect an air of superior- 
ity, or to assume too prominent a part in the dia- 
logue, especially in large or mixed company, where 
he was rather disposed to be silent, reserving the 
display of his powers for the unrestrained inter- 
course of friendship. He was a stranger not only 

G 



50 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

to base and malignant passions, but to the paltry 
jealousies which sometimes sour the intercourse of 
men of letters. On the contrary, he was ever prompt 
to do ample justice to the merits of others. His 
heart was warm with the feeling of universal benev- 
olence. Too sanguine and romantic views had 
exposed him to some miscalculations and conse- 
quent disappointments in youth, from which, how- 
ever, he was subsequently retrieved by the strength 
of his understanding, which, combining with what 
may be called his natural elevation of soul, enabled 
him to settle the soundest principles for the regula- 
tion of his opinions and conduct in after life. His 
reading was careless and desultory, but his appetite 
was voracious ; and the great amount of miscella- 
neous information which he thus amassed was all 
demanded to supply the outpourings of his mind in 
a thousand channels of entertainment and instruc- 
tion. His unwearied application is attested by the 
large amount of his works, large even for the pres- 
ent day, when mind seems to have caught the accel- 
erated movement so generally given to the opera- 
tions of machinery. The whole number of Brown's 
printed works, comprehending his editorial as well 
as original productions, to the former of which his 
own pen contributed a very disproportionate share, 
is not less than four-and-twenty printed volumes, 
not to mention various pamphlets, anonymous con- 
tributions to divers periodicals, as well as more than 
one compilation of laborious research which he left 
unfinished at his death. 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 51 

Of this vast amount of matter, produced within 
the brief compass of Httle more than ten years, that 
portion on which his fame as an author must per- 
manently rest is his novels. We have already en- 
tered too minutely into the merits of these produc- 
tions to require anything farther than a few general 
observations. They may probably claim to be re- 
garded as having first opened the way to the suc- 
cessful cultivation of romantic fiction in this coun- 
try. Great doubts were long entertained of our 
capabilities for immediate success in this depart- 
ment. We had none of the buoyant, stirring asso- 
ciations of a romantic age ; none of the chivalrous 
pageantry, the feudal and border story, or Robin 
Hood adventure ; none of the dim, shadowy super- 
stitions, and the traditional legends, which had gath- 
ered like moss round every stone, hill, and valley of 
the olden countries. Everything here wore a spick- 
and-span new aspect, and lay in the broad, garish 
sunshine of everyday life. We had none of the pic- 
turesque varieties of situation or costume ; every- 
thing lay on the same dull, prosaic level ; in short, 
we had none of the most obvious elements of po- 
etry : at least so it appeared to the vulgar eye. It 
required the eye of genius to detect the rich stores 
of romantic and poetic interest that lay beneath the 
crust of society. Brown was aware of the capabil- 
ities of our country, and the poverty of the results 
he was less inclined to impute to the soil than to 
the cultivation of it ; at least this would appear from 
some remarks dropped in his correspondence in 



52 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

1794, several years before he broke ground in this 
field himself. " It used to be a favourite maxim 
v^ith me, that the genius of a poet should be sacred 
to the glory of his country. How^ far this rule can 
be reduced to practice by an American bard, how 
far he can prudently observe it, and what success 
has crowned the efforts of those who, in their com- 
positions, have shown that they have not been un- 
mindful of it, is perhaps not worth the inquiry. 

" Does it not appear to you that, to give poetry a 
popular currency and universal reputation, a partic- 
ular cast of manners and state of civiUzation is ne- 
cessary 1 I have sometimes thought so, but perhaps 
it is an error ; and the want of popular poems ar- 
gues only the demerit of those who have already 
written, or some defect in their works, which unfits 
them for every taste or understanding." 

The success of our author's experiment, which 
was entirely devoted to American subjects, fully es- 
tablished the soundness of his opinions, which have 
been abundantly confirmed by the prolific pens of 
Irving, Cooper, Sedgwick, and other accomplished 
writers, who, in their diversified sketches of national 
character and scenery, have shown the full capacity 
of our country for all the purposes of fiction. Brown 
does not direct himself, like them, to the illustration 
of social life and character. He is little occupied 
with the exterior forms of society. He works in 
the depths of the heart, dweUing less on human ac- 
tion than the sources of it. He has been said to 
have formed himself on Godwin. Indeed, he open- 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 53 

ly avowed his admiration of that eminent writer, and 
has certainly, in some respects, adopted his mode of 
operation, studying character with a philosophic 
rather than a poetic eye. But there is no servile im- 
itation in all this. He has borrowed the same 
torch, indeed, to read the page of human nature, but 
the lesson he derives from it is totally different. His 
great object seems to be to exhibit the soul in scenes 
of extraordinary interest. For this purpose, striking 
and perilous situations are devised, or circumstan- 
ces of strong moral excitenient, a troubled con- 
science, partial gleams of insanity, or bodings of 
imaginary evil, which haunt the soul, and force it 
into all the agonies of terror. In the midst of the 
fearful strife, we are coolly invited to investigate its 
causes and all the various phenomena which attend 
it; every contingency, probability, nay, possibility, 
however remote, is discussed and nicely balanced. 
The heat of the reader is seen to evaporate in this 
cold-blooded dissection, in which our author seems 
to rival Butler's hero, who, 

" Profoundly skilled in analytic, 
Could distinguish and divide 
A hair 'twixt south and southwest side." 

We are constantly struck with the strange contrast 
of over-passion and over-reasoning. But perhaps, 
after all, these defects could not be pruned away 
from Brown's composition without detriment to his 
peculiar excellences. 8i non errasset, fecerat ille 
minus. If so, we may willingly pardon the one for 
the sake of the other. 

We cannot close without adverting to our au- 



54 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

thor's Style. He bestowed great pains on the for^ 
mation of it ; but, in our opinion, without great suc- 
cess, at least in his novels. It has an elaborate, fac- 
titious air, contrasting singularly with the general 
simpHcity of his taste and the careless rapidity of 
his composition. We are aware, indeed, that works 
of imagination may bear a higher flush of colour, a 
poetical varnish, in short, that must be refused to 
graver and more studied narrative. No writer has 
been so felicitous in reaching the exact point of 
good taste in this particular as Scott, who, on a 
groundwork of prose, may be said to have enabled 
his readers to breathe an atmosphere of poetry. 
More than one author, on the other hand, as Flo- 
rian, in French, for example, and Lady Morgan, in 
English, in their attempts to reach this middle re- 
gion, are eternally fluttering on the wing of senti- 
ment, equally removed from good prose and good 
poetry. 

Brown, perhaps willing to avoid this extreme, 
has fallen into the opposite one, forcing his style 
into unnatural vigour and condensation. Unusual 
and pedantic epithets, and elliptical forms of ex- 
pression, in perpetual violation of idiom, are resort- 
ed to at the expense of simplicity and nature. He 
seems averse to telling simple things in a simple 
way. Thus, for example, we have such expres- 
sions as these : " I was fraught with the persuasion 
that my life was endangered." " The outer door 
was ajar. I shut it with trembling eagerness, and 
drew every bolt that appended to it." " His brain 
seemed to swell beyond its continent," " 1 waited 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. 55 

till their slow and hoarser inspirations showed them 
to be both asleep. Just then, on changing my po- 
sition, my head struck against some things which 
depended from the ceiling of the closet." " It was 
still dark, but my sleep was at an end, and by a 
common apparatus (tinder-box V) that lay beside my 
bed, I could instantly produce a light." " On re- 
covering from deliquium, you found it where it had 
been dropped." It is unnecessary to multiply ex- 
amples, which we should not have adverted to at 
all had not our opinions in this matter been at va- 
riance with those of more than one respectable 
critic. This sort of language is no doubt in very 
bad taste. It cannot be denied, however, that, al- 
though these defects are sufficiently general to give 
a colouring to the whole of his composition, yet 
his works afford many passages of undeniable elo- 
quence and rhetorical beauty. It must be remem- 
bered, too, that his novels were his first productions, 
thrown off with careless profusion, and exhibiting 
many of the defects of an immature mind, which 
longer experience and practice might have correct- 
ed. Indeed, his later writings are recommended by 
a more correct and natural phraseology, although 
it must be allowed that the graver topics to which 
they are devoted, if they did not authorize, would 
at least render less conspicuous any studied formal- 
ity and artifice of expression. 

These verbal blemishes, combined with defects 
already alluded to in the development of his plots, 
but which all relate to the form rather than the 
fond of his subject, have made our author less ex- 



56 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tensively popular than his extraordinary powers 
would have entitled him to be. His peculiar mer- 
its, indeed, appeal to a higher order of criticism 
than is to be found in ordinary and superficial read^ 
ers. Like the productions of Coleridge or Words- 
worth, they seem to rely on deeper sensibilities than 
most men possess, and tax the reasoning powers ' 
more severely than is agreeable to readers who re- 
sort to works of fiction only as an epicurean indul- 
gence. The number of their admirers is therefore 
necessarily more limited than that of writers of less 
talent, who have shown more tact in accommoda- 
ting themselves to the tone of popular feeling or 
prejudice. 

But we are unwilling to part, with anything like 
a tone of disparagement lingering on our lips, with 
the amiable author to whom our rising literature is 
under such large and various obhgations ; w ho first 
opened a view into the boundless fields of fiction, 
which subsequent adventurers have successfully ex- 
plored ; who has furnished so much for our instruc- 
tion in the several departments of history and criti- 
cism, and has rendered still more effectual service 
by kindling in the bosom of the youthful scholar 
the same generous love of letters which glowed in 
his own; whose writings, in fine, have uniformly 
inculcated the pure and elevated morality exem- 
plified in his life. The only thing we can regret 
is, that a life so useful should have been so short, 
if, indeed, that can be considered short which has 
done so much towards attaining life's great end. 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 57 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND.* 

JULY, 1830. 

There is nothing in which the moderns surpass 
the ancients more conspicuously than in their noble 
provisions for the relief of indigence and distress. 
The public policy of the ancients seems to have 
embraced only v^^hatever might promote the aggran- 
dizement or the direct prosperity of the state, and 
to have cared little for those unfortunate beings 
vs^ho, from disease or incapacity of any kind, v^ere 
disqualified from contributing to this. But the be- 
neficent influence of Christianity, combined with 
the general tendency of our social institutions, has 
led to the recognition of rights in the individual as 
sacred as those of the community, and has suggest- 
ed manifold provisions for personal comfort and hap- 
piness. 

The spirit of benevolence, thus widely, and often- 
times judiciously exerted, continued, until a very re- 
cent period, however, strangely insensible to the 
claims of a large class of objects, to whom nature, 
and no misconduct or imprudence of their own, as 
is too often the case with the subjects of public 
charity, had denied some of the most estimable fac- 
ulties of man. No suitable institutions, until the 
close of the last century, have been provided for the 
nurture of the deaf and dumb, or the blind. Immu- 

* An Act to Incorporate the New-England Asylum for the Blind. Ap- 
proved March 2d, 1829. 

H 



58 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES 

red within hospitals and almshouses, like so many 
lunatics and incurables, they have been delivered 
over, if they escaped the physical, to all the moral 
contagion too frequently incident to such abodes, 
and have thus been involved in a mental darkness 
far more deplorable than their bodily one. 

This injudicious treatment has resulted from the 
erroneous principle of viewing these unfortunate be- 
ings as an absolute burden on the pubUc, utterly in- 
capable of contributing to their own subsistence, or 
of ministering in any degree to their ow^n intellect- 
ual wants. Instead, however, of being degraded by 
such unworthy views, they should have been regard- 
ed as, what in truth they are, possessed of corpo- 
real and mental capacities perfectly competent, un- 
der proper management, to the production of the 
most useful results. If wisdom from one entrance 
was quite shut out, other avenues for its admission 
still remained to be opened. 

In order to give effective aid to persons in this 
predicament, it is necessary to place ourselves as 
far as possible in their peculiar situation, to consid- 
er to what faculties this insulated condition is, on 
the whole, most favourable, and in what direction 
they can be exercised with the best chance of suc- 
cess. Without such foresight, all our endeavours to 
aid them will only put them upon efforts above their 
strength, and result in serious mortification. 

The blind, from the cheerful ways of men cut off, 
are necessarily excluded from the busy theatre of 
human action. Their infirmity, however, which 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 59 

consigns them to darkness, and often to solitude, 
would seem favourable to contemplative habits, and 
to the pursuits of abstract science and pure specu- 
lation. Undisturbed by external objects, the mind 
necessarily turns within, and concentrates its ideas 
on any point of investigation with greater intensity 
and perseverance. It is no uncommon thing, there- 
fore, to find persons setting apart the silent hours of 
the evening for the purpose of composition or other 
purely intellectual exercise. Malebranche, when he 
wished to think intensely, used to close his shutters 
in the daytime, excluding every ray of light ; and 
hence Democritus is said to have put out his eyes 
in order that he might philosophize the better — a 
story, the veracity of which Cicero, who relates it, 
is prudent enough not to vouch for. 

BUndness must also be exceedingly favourable to 
the discipline of the memory. Whoever has had 
the misfortune, from any derangement of the organ, 
to be compelled to derive his knowledge of books 
less from the eye than the ear, will feel the truth of 
this. The difficulty of recalling what has once es- 
caped, of reverting to, /pr dwelling on the passages 
read aloud by another, compels t?lie hearer to give 
undivided attention to the subject, and to impress it 
more forcibly on his own mind by subsequent and 
methodical reflection. Instances of the cultivation 
of this faculty to an extraordinary extent have been 
witnessed among the blind, and it has been most ad- 
vantageously applied to the pursuit of abstract sci- 
ence, especially mathematics. 



60 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

One of the most eminent illustrations of these 
remarks is the well-known history of Saunderson, 
who, though deprived in his infancy not only of 
sight, but of the organ itself, contrived to become so 
well acquainted with the Greek tongue as to read 
the works of the ancient mathematicians in the ori- 
ginal. He made such advances in the higher de- 
partments of the science, that he was appointed, 
" though not matriculated at the University," to fill 
the chair which a short time previous had been oc- 
cupied by Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge. The 
lectures of this blind professor on the most abstruse 
points of the Newtonian philosophy, and especially 
on optics, naturally filled his audience with admira- 
tion ; and the perspicuity with which he communi- 
cated his ideas is said to have been unequalled. He 
was enabled, by the force of his memory, to perform 
many long operations in arithmetic, and to carry in 
his mind the most complex geometrical figures. As, 
however, it became necessary to supply the want of 
vision by some symbols which might be sensible to 
the touch, he contrived a table in which pins, whose 
value was determined principally by their relative 
position to each other, served him instead of figures, 
while for his diagrams he employed pegs, inserted at 
the requisite angles to each other, representing the 
lines by threads drawn around them. He was so 
expert in his use of these materials, that, when per- 
forming his calculations, he would change the posi- 
tion of the pins with nearly the same facility that 
another person would indite figures, and when dis- 



V 

ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 6^ 

turbed in an operation would afterward resume it 
again, ascertaining the posture in which he had left 
it by passing his hand carefully over the table. To 
such shifts and inventions does human ingenuity re- 
sort when stimulated by the thirst of knowledge; 
as the plant, when thrown into shade on one side, 
sends forth its branches eagerly in that direction 
where the light is permitted to fall upon it. 

In like manner, the celebrated mathematician, 
Euler, continued, for many years after he became 
blind, to indite and publish the results of his scien- 
tific labours, and at the time of his decease left 
nearly a hundred memoirs ready for the press, most 
of which have since been given to the world. An 
example of diligence equally indefatigable, though 
turned in a different channel, occurs in our contem- 
porary Huber, who has contributed one of the most 
dehghtful volumes within the compass of natural 
history, and who, if he employed the eyes of an- 
other, guided them in their investigation to the 
right results by the light of his own mind. 

Blindness would seem to be propitious, also, to 
the exercise of the inventive powers. Hence po- 
etry, from the time of Thamyris and the blind Mse- 
onides down to the Welsh harper and the ballad- 
grinder of our day, has been assigned as the pecu- 
liar province of those bereft of vision, 

" As the wakeful bird 
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, 
Tunes her nocturnal note." 

The greatest epic poem of antiquity was probably, 



62 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

as that of the modems was certainly, composed in 
darkness. It is easy to understand how the man 
who has once seen can recall and body forth in his 
conceptions new combinations of material beauty ; 
but it would seem scarcely possible that one born 
blind, excluded from all acquaintance with " colour- 
ed nature," as Condillac finely styles it, should ex- 
cel in descriptive poetry. Yet there are eminent 
examples of this ; among others, that of Blacklock, 
whose verses abound in the most agreeable and pic- 
turesque images. Yet he could have formed no 
other idea of colours than was conveyed by their 
moral associations, the source, indeed, of most of 
the pleasures we derive from descriptive poetry. It 
was thus that he studied the variegated aspect of 
nature, and read in it the successive revolutions of 
the seasons, their freshness, their prime, and decay. 
Mons. Guillie, in an interesting essay on the in- 
struction of the blind, to which we shall have occa- 
sion repeatedly to refer, quotes an example of the 
association of ideas in regard to colours, which oc- 
curred in one of his own pupils, who, in reciting the 
well-known passage in Horace, " ruhente dextera sa- 
cras jaculatus arcesl' translated the first two words 
by " fiery" or " burning right hand." On being re- 
quested to render it literally, he called it " red right 
hand," and gave as the reason for his former ver- 
sion, that he could form no positive conception of 
a red colour; but that, as fire was said to be red, he 
connected the idea of heat with this colour, and had 
therefore interpreted the wrath of Jupiter, demohsh- 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 63 

ing town and tower, by the epithet " fiery or burn- 
ing ;" for " when people are angry," he added, "they 
are hot, and when they are hot, they must of course 
be red." He certainly seems to have formed a much 
more accurate notion of red than Locke's blind 
man. 

But while a gift for poetry belongs only to the 
inspired few, and while many have neither taste 
nor talent for mathematical or speculative science, 
it is a consolation to reflect that the humblest indi- 
vidual who is destitute of sight may so far supply 
this deficiency by the perfection of the other senses 
as by their aid to attain a considerable degree of 
intellectual culture, as well as a familiarity with 
some of the most useful mechanic arts. It will be 
easier to conceive to what extent the perceptions 
of touch and hearing may be refined if we reflect 
how far that of sight is sharpened by exclusive re- 
liance on it in certain situations. Thus the mari- 
ner descries objects at night, and at a distance upon 
the ocean, altogether imperceptible to the unprac- 
tised eye of a landsman. And the North American 
Indian steers his course undeviatingly through the 
trackless wilderness, guided only by such signs as 
escape the eye of the most inquisitive white man. 

In like manner, the senses of hearing and feeling 
are capable of attaining such a degree of perfection 
in a blind person, that by them alone he can distin- 
guish his various acquaintances, and even the pres- 
ence of persons wiiom he has but rarely met be- 
fore, the size of the apartment, and the general lo- 



64 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

cality of the spots in which he may happen to be, 
and guide himself safely across the most solitary 
districts and amid the throng of towns. Dr. Bew, 
in a paper in the Manchester Collection of Me- 
moirs, gives an account of a blind man of his ac- 
quaintance in Derbyshire, who was much used as a 
guide for travellers in the night over certain intri- 
cate roads, and particularly when the tracks were 
covered with snow. This same man was afterward 
employed as a projector and surveyor of roads in 
that county. We well remember a blind man in 
the neighbouring town of Salem, who officiated 
some twenty years since as the town crier, when 
that functionary performed many of the advertising 
duties now usurped by the newspaper, making his 
diurnal round, and stopping with great precision at 
every corner, trivium or quodrivium, to chime his 
"melodious twang." Yet this feat, the familiarity 
of which prevented it from occasioning any sur- 
prise, could have resulted only from the nicest ob- 
servation of the undulations of the ground, or by an 
attention to the currents of air, or the different sound 
of the voice or other noises in these openings, signs 
altogether lost upon the man of eyes. 

Mons. Guillie mentions several apparently well- 
attested anecdotes of blind persons who had the 
power of discriminating colours by the touch. One 
of the individuals noticed by him, a Dutchman, was 
so expert in this way that he was sure to come off 
conqueror at the card-table by the knowledge which 
he thus obtained of his adversary's hand, whenever 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 65 

it came to his turn to deal. This power of discrim- 
ination of colom's, which seems to be a gift only of 
a very few of the finer-fingered gentry, must be found- 
ed on the different consistency or smoothness of the 
ingredients used in the various dyes. A more cer- 
tain method of ascertaining these colours, that of 
tasting or touching them with the tongue, is fre- 
quently resorted to by the blind, who by this means 
often distinguish between those analogous colours, 
as black and dark blue, red and pink, which, having 
the greatest apparent affinity, not unfrequently de- 
ceive the eye. 

Diderot, in an ingenious letter on the bhnd, a 
Tusage de ceux qui voient, has given a circumstan* 
tial narration of his visit to a blind man at Puis- 
seaux, the son of a professor in the University of 
Paris, and well known in his day from the various 
accomphshments and manual dexterity which he 
exhibited, remarkable in a person in his situation. 
Being asked what notion he had formed of an eye, 
he replied, " I conceive it to be an organ on which 
the air produces the same effect as this staff on my 
hand. If, when you are looking at an object, I 
should interpose anything between your eyes and 
that object, it would prevent you from seeing it. 
And I am in the same predicament when I seek 
one thing with my staff and come across another." 
An explanation, says Diderot, as lucid as any which 
could be given by Descartes, who, it is singular, at- 
tempts, in his Dioptrics, to explain the analogy be- 
tween the senses of feehng and seeing by figures of 

I 



66 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

men blindfolded, groping their way with staffs in 
their hands. This same intelligent personage be- 
came so familiar with the properties of touch that 
he seems to have accounted them almost equally 
valuable with those of vision. On being interro- 
gated if he felt a great desire to have eyes, he an- 
swered, " Were it not for the mere gratification of 
curiosity, I think I should do as well to wish for 
long arms. It seems to me that my hands would 
inform me better of what is going on in the moon 
than your eyes and telescopes ; and then the eyes 
lose the power of vision more readily than the hands 
that of feeling. It would be better to perfect the 
organ which I have than to bestow on me that 
which I have not." 

Indeed, the " geometric sense" of touch, as Buffon 
terms it, as far as it reaches, is more faithful, and 
conveys oftentimes a more satisfactory idea of ex- 
ternal forms than the eye itself The great defect 
is that its range is necessarily so hmited. It is told 
of Saunderson that on one occasion he detected by 
his finger a counterfeit coin which had deceived the 
eye of a connoisseur. We are hardly aware how 
much of our dexterity in the use of the eye arises 
from incessant practice. Those who have been re- 
lieved from blindness at an advanced, or even early 
period of life, have been found frequently to recur 
to the old and more famihar sense of touch, in pref- 
erence to the sight. The celebrated English anat- 
omist, Cheselden, mentions several illustrations of 
this fact in an account given by him of a blind boy, 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 67 

whom he had successfully couched for cataracts, 
at the age of fourteen. It was long before the youth 
could discriminate by his eye between his old com- 
panions, the family cat and dog, dissimilar as such 
animals appear to us in colour and conformation. 
Being ashamed to ask the oft-repeated question, he 
was observed one day to pass his hand carefully 
over the cat, and then, looking at her steadfastly, to 
exclaim, " So, puss, I shall know you another time." 
It is more natural that he should have been deceiv- 
ed by the illusory art of painting, and it was long 
before he could comprehend that the objects depict- 
ed did not possess the same relief on the canvass 
as in nature. He inquired, "Which is the lying 
sense here, the sight or the touch f 

The faculty of hearing would seem susceptible of 
a similar refinement with that of seeing. To prove 
this without going into farther detail, it is only ne- 
cessary to observe that much the larger proportion 
of blind persons are, more or less, proficients in mu- 
sic, and that in some of the institutions for their edu- 
cation, as that in Paris, for instance, all the pupils 
are instructed in this delightful art. The gift of a 
natural ear for melody, therefore, deemed compara- 
tively rare with the clairvoyans, would seem to exist 
so far in every individual as to be capable, by a suit- 
able cultivation, of affording a high degree of rehsh, 
at least to himself 

As, in order to a successful education of the blind, 
it becomes necessary to understand what are the fac- 
ulties, intellectual and corporeal, to the development 



68 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

and exercise of which their pecuUar condition is best 
adapted, so it is equally necessary to understand how- 
far, and in what manner, their moral constitution is 
likely to be affected by the insulated position in 
which they are placed. The blind man, shut up 
within the precincts of his own microcosm, is sub- 
jected to influences of a very different complexion 
from the bulk of mankind, inasmuch as each of the 
senses is best fitted to the introduction of a certain 
class of ideas into the mind, and he is deprived of 
that one through which the rest of his species receive 
by far the greatest number of theirs. Thus it will be 
readily understood that his notions of modesty and 
delicacy may a good deal differ from those of the 
world at large. The blind man of Puisseaux con- 
fessed that he could not comprehend why it should 
be reckoned improper to expose one part of the per- 
son rather than another. Indeed, the conventional 
rules, so necessarily adopted in society in this rela- 
tion, might seem, in a great degree, superfluous in a 
blind community. 

The blind man would seem, ?Jso, to be less Hkely 
to be endowed with the degree of sensibility usual 
with those who enjoy the blessing of sight. It is 
difficult to say how much of our early education de- 
pends on the looks, the frowns, the smiles, the tears, 
the example, in fact, of those placed over and around 
us. From all this the blind child is necessarily ex- 
cluded. These, however, are the great sources of 
sympathy. We feel little for the joys or the sorrows 
which we do not witness. " Out of sight, out of 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 69 

mind," sajs the old proverb. Hence people are so 
ready to turn away from distress which they cannot, 
or their avarice will not suffer them to relieve. 
Hence, too, persons whose compassionate hearts 
would bleed at the infliction of an act of cruelty on 
so large an animal as a horse or a dog, for example, 
will crush without concern a wilderness of insects, 
whose delicate organization, and whose bodily ago- 
nies are imperceptible to the naked eye. The 
shghtest injury occurring in our own presence af- 
fects us infinitely more than the tidings of the most 
murderous battle, or the sack of the most populous 
and flourishing city at the extremity of the globe. 
Yet such, without much exaggeration, is the relative 
position of the blind, removed by their infirmity at a 
distance from the world, from the daily exhibition 
of those mingled scenes of grief and gladness, which 
have their most important uses, perhaps, in calling 
forth our sympathies for our fellow-creatures. 

It has been affn-med that the situation of the blind 
is unpropitious to religious sentiment. They are ne- 
cessarily insensible to the grandeur of the spectacle 
which forces itself upon our senses every day of our 
existence. The magnificent map of the heavens, with 

*' Every star 
Which the clear concave of a winter's night 
Pours on the eye," 

is not unrolled for them. The revolutions of the 
seasons, with all their beautiful varieties of form and 
colour, and whatever glories of the creation lift the 
soul in wonder and gratitude to the Creator, are not 
for them. Their world is circumscribed by the little 



70 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

circle which they can span with their own arms. 
All hejond has for them no real existence. This 
seems to have passed within the mind of the mathe- 
matician Saunderson, whose notions of a Deity 
would seem to have been, to the last, exceedingly 
vague and unsettled. The clergyman who visited 
him in his latter hours endeavoured to impress upon 
him the evidence of a God as afforded by the aston- 
ishing mechanism of the universe. " Alas !" said 
the dying philosopher, " I have been condemned to 
pass my life in darkness, and you speak to me of 
prodigies which I cannot comprehend, and which 
can only be felt by you, and those who see like you !" 
When reminded of the faith of Newton, Leibnitz, 
and Clarke, minds from whom he had drunk so 
deeply of instruction, and for whom he entertained 
the profoundest veneration, he remarked, " The testi- 
mony of Newton is not so strong for me as that of 
Nature was for him ; Newton believed on the Word 
of God himself, while I am reduced to beheve on that 
of Newton." He expired with this ejaculation on 
his lips, " God of Newton, have mercy on me !" 

These, however, may be considered as the pee- 
vish ebullitions of a naturally skeptical and some- 
what disappointed spirit, impatient of an infirmity 
which obstructed, as he conceived, his advancement 
in the career of science to which he had so zealously 
devoted himself It was in allusion to this, undoubt- 
edly, that he depicted his Hfe as having been " one 
long desire and continued privation." 

It is far more reasonable to believe that there are 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 71 

certain peculiarities in the condition of the blind 
which more than counterbalance the unpropitious 
circumstances above described, and which have a 
decided tendency to awaken devotional sentiment 
in their minds. They are the subjects of a griev- 
ous calamity, which, as in all such cases, naturally 
disposes the heart to sober reflection, and, when 
permanent and irremediable, to passive resignation. 
Their situation necessarily excludes most of those 
temptations which so sorely beset us in the world — 
those tumultuous passions which, in the general ri- 
valry, divide man from man, and imbitter the sweet 
cup of social life — those sordid appetites which de- 
grade us to the level of the brutes. They are sub- 
jected, on the contrary, to the most healthful influ- 
ences. Their occupations are of a tranquil, and 
oftentimes of a purely intellectual character. Their 
pleasures are derived from the endearments of do- 
mestic intercourse, and the attentions almost always 
conceded to persons in their dependant condition 
must necessarily beget a reciprocal kindhness of 
feeling in their own bosoms. In short, the uniform 
tenour of their lives is such as naturally to dispose 
them to resignation, serenity, and cheerfulness ; and 
accordingly, as far as our own experience goes, 
these have usually been the characteristics of the 
blind. 

Indeed, the cheerfulness almost universally inci- 
dent to persons deprived of sight leads us to con- 
sider blindness as, on the whole, a less calamity than 
deafness. The deaf man is continually exposed to 



72 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the sight of pleasures and to society in which he 
can take no part. He is the guest at a banquet of 
which he is not permitted to partake, the spectator 
at a theatre where he cannot comprehend a sylla- 
ble. If the blind man is excluded from sources of 
enjoyment equally important, he has, at least, the 
advantage of not perceiving, and not even compre- 
hending what he has lost. It may be added, that 
perhaps the greatest privation consequent on blind- 
ness is the inability to read, as that on deafness is 
the loss of the pleasures of society. Now the eyes 
of another may be made, in a great degree, to sup- 
ply this defect of the blind man, while no art can 
afford a corresponding substitute to the deaf for the 
privations to which he is doomed in social inter- 
course. He cannot hear with the ears of another. 
As, however, it is undeniable that blindness makes 
one more dependant than deafness, we may be con- 
tent with the conclusion that the former would be 
the most eligible for the rich, and the latter for the 
poor. Our remarks will be understood as applying 
to those only who are wholly destitute of the facul- 
ties of sight and hearing. A person afflicted only 
with a partial derangement or infirmity of vision is 
placed in the same tantalizing predicament above 
described of the deaf, and is, consequently, found to 
be usually of a far more impatient and irritable tem- 
perament, and, consequently, less happy than the 
totally blind. With all this, we doubt whether there 
be one of our readers, even should he assent to the 
general truth of our remarks, who would not infi- 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 73 

nitely prefer to incur partial to total blindness, and 
deafness to either. Such is the prejudice in favour 
of eyes ! 

Patience, perseverance, habits of industry, and, 
above all, a craving appetite for knowledge, are suf- 
ficiently common to be considered as characteris- 
tics of the blind, and have tended greatly to facili- 
tate their education, which must otherwise prove 
somewhat tedious, and, indeed, doubtful as to its re- 
sults, considering the formidable character of the 
obstacles to be encountered. A curious instance 
of perseverance in overcoming such obstacles oc- 
curred at Paris, when the institutions for the deaf 
and dumb and for the blind were assembled under 
the same roof in the convent of the Celestines. 
The pupils of the two seminaries, notwithstanding 
the apparently insurmountable barrier interposed 
between them by their respective infirmities, con- 
trived to open a communication with each other, 
which they carried on with the greatest vivacity. 

It was probably the consideration of those moral 
qualities, as well as of the capacity for improve- 
ment which we have described as belonging to the 
blind, which induced the benevolent Haiiy, in con- 
junction with the Philanthropic Society of Paris, to 
open there, in 1784, the first* regular seminary for 
their education ever attempted. This institution 
underwent several modifications, not for the better, 
during the revolutionary period which followed ; 
until, in 1816, it was placed on the respectable ba- 
sis on which it now exists, under the direction of 

K 



k 



74 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Dr. Guillie, whose untiring exertions have been 
blessed with the most beneficial results. 

We shall give a brief view of the course of edu- 
cation pursued under his direction, as exhibited by 
him in the valuable treatise to which we have al- 
ready referred, occasionally glancing at the method 
adopted in the corresponding institution at Edin- 
burgh. 

The fundamental object proposed in every scheme 
of education for the blind is, to direct the attention 
of the pupil to those studies and mechanic arts 
which he will be able afterward to pursue by means 
of his own exertions and resources, without any 
external aid. The sense of touch is the one, there- 
fore, almost exclusively relied on. The fingers are 
the eyes of the blind. They are taught to read in 
Paris by feeUng the surface of metallic types, and 
in Edinburgh by means of letters raised on a blank 
leaf of paper. If they are previously acquainted 
with spelling, which may be easily taught them be- 
fore entering the institution, they learn to discrimi- 
nate the several letters with great facility. Their 
perceptions become so fine by practice, that they 
can discern even the finest print, and when the fin- 
gers fail them, readily distinguish it by applying the 
tongue. A similar method is employed for instruct- 
ing them in figures ; the notation table, invented by 
Saunderson, and once used in the Paris seminary, 
having been abandoned as less simple and obvious, 
although his symbols for the representation of geo- 
metrical diagrams are still retained. 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 75 

As it would be labour lost to learn the art of read- 
ing without having books to read, various attempts 
have been made to supply this desideratum. The 
first hint of the form now adopted for the impres- 
sion of these books was suggested by the appear- 
ance exhibited on the reverse side of a copy as re- 
moved fresh from the printing-press. In imitation 
of this, a leaf of paper of a firm texture is forcibly 
impressed with types unstained by ink, and larger 
than the ordinary size, until a sufficiently bold relief 
has been obtained to enable the blind person to dis- 
tinguish the characters by the touch. The French 
have adopted the Italian hand, or one very like it, 
for the fashion of the letters, while the Scotch have 
invented one more angular and rectilinear, which, 
besides the advantage of greater compactness, is 
found better suited to accurate discrimination by the 
touch than smooth and extended curves and circles. 

Several important works have been already print- 
ed on this plan, viz., a portion of the Scriptures, 
catechisms, and offices for daily prayer ; grammars 
in the Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, and 
Spanish languages ; a Latin selecta, a geography, a 
course of general history, a selection from English 
poets and prose-writers, a course of literature, with 
a compilation of the choicest specimens of French 
eloquence. With all this, the art of printing for the 
blind is still in its infancy. The characters are so 
unwieldy, and the leaves (which cannot be printed 
on the reverse side, as this would flatten the letters 
upon the other) are necessarily so numerous as to 



76 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

make the volume exceedingly bulky, and of course 
expensive. The Gospel of St John, for example, 
expands into three large octavo volumes. Some 
farther improvement must occur, therefore, before 
the invention can become extensively useful. There 
can be no reason to doubt of such a result eventu- 
ally, for it is only by long and repeated experiment 
that the art of printing in the usual way, and every 
other art, indeed, has been brought to its present 
perfection. Perhaps some mode may be adopted 
like that of stenography, which, although encum- 
bering the learner with some additional difficulties 
at first, may abundantly compensate him in the con- 
densed forms, and consequently cheaper and more 
numerous publications which could be afforded by 
it. Perhaps ink, or some other material of greater 
consistency than that ordinarily used in printing 
may be devised, which, when communicated by the 
type to the paper, will leave a character sufficiently 
raised to be distinguished by the touch. We have 
known a blind person able to decipher the charac- 
ters in a piece of music to which the ink had been 
imparted more liberally than usual. In the mean 
time, what has been already done has conferred a 
service on the blind which we, who become insen- 
sible from the very prodigality of our blessings, can- 
not rightly estimate. The glimmering of the taper, 
which is lost in the blaze of day, is sufficient to 
guide the steps of the wanderer in darkness. The 
unsealed volume of Scripture will furnish him with 
the best sources of consolation under every priva- 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 77 

tion ; the various grammars are so many keys with 
which to unlock the stores of knowledge to enrich 
his after hfe, and the selections from the most beau- 
tiful portions of elegant literature will afford him a 
permanent source of recreation and delight. 

One method used for instruction in writing is, to 
direct the pencil, or stylus, in a groove cut in the 
fashion of the different letters. Other modes, how- 
ever, too complex for description here, are resorted 
to, by which the blind person is enabled not only to 
write, but to read what he has thus traced. A port- 
able writing-case for this purpose has also been in- 
vented by one of the blind, who, it is observed, are 
the most ingenious in supplying, as they are best 
acquainted with, their own wants. A very simple 
method of epistolary correspondence, by means of a 
string-alphabet, as it is called, consisting of a cord 
or riband in which knots of various dimensions 
represent certain classes of letters, has been devised 
by two blind men at Edinburgh. This contrivance, 
which is so simple that it can be acquired in an 
hour's time by the most ordinary capacity, is as- 
serted to have the power of conveying ideas with 
equal precision with the pen. A bhnd lady of our 
acquaintance, however, whose fine understanding 
and temper have enabled her to surmount many of 
the difficulties of her situation, after a trial of this 
invention, gives the preference to the mode usually 
adopted by her of pricking the letters on the paper 
with a pin — an operation which she performs with 
astonishing rapidity, and which, in addition to the 



k 



78 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLAINIES. 

advantage possessed by the string-alphabet of bemg 
legible by the touch, answers more completely the 
purposes of epistolary correspondence, since it may 
be readily interpreted by any one on being held up 
to the hght. 

The scheme of instruction at the institution for 
the blind in Paris comprehends geography, history, 
the Greek and Latin, together with the French, 
Itahan, and English languages, arithmetic, and the 
higher branches of mathematics, music, and some 
of the most useful mechanic arts. For mathemat- 
ics, the pupils appear to discover a natural aptitude, 
many of them attaining such proficiency as not only 
to profit by the public lectures of the most eminent 
professors in the sciences, but to carry away the high- 
est prizes in the lyceums in a competition with those 
who possess the advantages of sight. In music, as 
we have before remarked, they all make greater or 
less proficiency. They are especially instructed in 
the organ, which, from its frequency in the churches, 
affords one of the most obvious means of obtaining 
a livelihood. 

The method of tuition adopted is that of mutual 
instruction. The blind are ascertained to learn most 
easily and expeditiously from those in the same con- 
dition with themselves. Two male teachers, with 
one female, are in this way found adequate to the 
superintendence of eighty scholars, which, consid- 
ering the obstacles to be encountered, must be ad- 
mitted to be a small apparatus for the production 
of such extensive results. 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 79 

In teaching them the mechanic arts, two princi- 
ples appear to be kept in view, namely, to select 
such for each individual respectively as may be best 
adapted to his future residence and destination ; the 
trades, for example, most suitable for a seaport be- 
ing those least so for the country, and vice versa. 
Secondly, to confine their attention to such occu- 
pations as from their nature are most accessible to, 
and which can be most perfectly attained by, per- 
sons in their situation. It is absurd to multiply ob- 
stacles from the mere vanity of conquering them. 

Printing is an art for which the blind show par- 
ticular talent, going through all the processes of 
composing, serving the press, and distributing the 
types with the same accuracy with those who can 
see. Indeed, much of this mechanical occupation 
with the dairvoyans (we are in want of some such 
compendious phrase in our language) appears to be 
the result rather of habit than any exercise of the 
eye. The blind print all the books for their own 
use. They are taught also to spin, to knit, in which 
last operation they are extremely ready, knitting 
very finely, with open work, &c., and are much 
employed by the Parisian hosiers in the manufac- 
ture of elastic vests, shirts, and petticoats. They 
make purses, delicately embroidered with figures of 
animals and flowers, whose various tints are select- 
ed with perfect propriety. The fingers of the fe- 
males are observed to be particularly adapted to this 
nicer sort of work, from their superior delicacy, or- 
dinarily, to those of men. They are employed also 



80 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

in manufacturing girths, in netting in all its branches, 
in making shoes of list, plush, cloth, coloured skin, 
and list carpets, of which a vast'number is annually 
disposed of. Weaving is particularly adapted to the 
blind, who perform all the requisite manipulation 
without any other assistance but that of setting up 
the warp. They manufacture whips, straw bot- 
toms for chairs, coarse straw hats, rope, cord, pack- 
thread, baskets, straw, rush, and plush mats, which 
are very saleable in France. 

The articles manufactured in the Asylum for the 
Blind in Scotland are somewhat different ; and as 
they show for what an extensive variety of occupa- 
tions they may be qualified in despite of their in- 
firmity, we will take the liberty, at the hazard of 
being somewhat tedious, of quoting the catalogue 
of them exhibited in one of their advertisements. 
The articles offered for sale consist of cotton and 
linen cloths, ticked and striped Hollands, towelling 
and diapers, worsted net for fruit-trees ; hair cloth, 
hair mats, and hair ropes ; basket-work of every de- 
scription; hair, India hemp, and straw door-mats; 
saddle girths; rope and twines of all kinds; netting 
for sheep-pens; garden and onion twine nets; fishing 
nets, beehives, mattresses, and cushions; feather beds, 
bolsters, and pillows ; mattresses and beds of every 
description cleaned and repaired. The labours in 
this department are performed by the boys. The girls 
are employed in sewing, knitting stockings, spinning, 
making fine banker's twine, and various works be- 
sides, usually executed by well-educated females. 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 81 

Such is the emulation of the blind, according to 
Dr. Guillie, in the institution of Paris, that hitherto 
there has been no necessity of stimulating their ex- 
ertions by the usual motives of reward or punish- 
ment. Delighted with their sensible progress in 
vanquishing the difficulties incident to their condi- 
tion, they are content if they can but place them- 
selves on a level with the more fortunate of their 
fellow-creatures. And it is observed that many, 
who in the solitude of their own homes have failed 
in their attempts to learn some of the arts taught 
in this institution, have acquired a knowledge of 
them with great alacrity when cheered by the sym- 
pathy of individuals involved in the same calamity 
with themselves, and with whom, of course, they 
could compete with equal probability of success. 

The example of Paris has been followed in the 
principal cities in most of the other countries of 
Europe: in England, Scotland, Russia, Prussia, Aus- 
tria, Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark. These 
establishments, which are conducted on the same 
general principles, have adopted a plan of educa- 
tion more or less comprehensive, some of them, like 
those of Paris and Edinburgh, involving the higher 
branches of intellectual education, and others, as in 
London and Liverpool, confining themselves chiefly 
to practical arts. The results, however, have been 
in the highest degree cheering to the philanthropist 
in the hght thus poured in upon minds to which all 
the usual avenues were sealed up — in the opportu- 
nity afforded them of developing those latent pow- 

L 



82 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ers which had been hitherto wasted in inaction, and 
in the happiness thus imparted to an unfortunate 
class of beings, who now, for the first time, were 
permitted to assume their proper station in society, 
and instead of encumbering, to contribute, by their 
own exertions, to the general prosperity. 

We rejoice that the inhabitants of our own city 
have been the first to give an example of such be- 
neficent institutions in the New World. And it is 
principally with the view of directing the attention 
of the public towards it that we have gone into a 
review of what has been effected in this way in 
Europe. The credit of having first suggested the 
undertaking here is due to our townsman. Dr. John 
D. Fisher, through whose exertions, aided by those 
of several other benevolent individuals, the subject 
was brought before the Legislature of this state, 
and an act of incorporation was granted to the pe- 
titioners, bearing date March 2d, 1829, authorizing 
them, under the title of the "New-England Asylum 
for the Blind," to hold property, receive donations 
and bequests, and to exercise the other functions 
usually appertaining to similar corporations. 

A resolution was subsequently passed, during the 
same session, requiring the selectmen of the several 
towns throughout the commonwealth to make re- 
turns of the number of blind inhabitants, with their 
ages, periods of blindness, personal condition, &c. 
By far the larger proportion of these functionaries, 
however, with a degree of apathy which does them 
very little credit, paid no attention whatever to this 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 83 

requisition. By the aid of such as did comply with 
it, and hy means of circulars addressed to the cler- 
gymen of the various parishes, advices have been 
received from one hundred and forty-one tov^ns, 
comprising somewhat less than half of the whole 
number within the state. From this imperfect es- 
timate it would appear that the number of blind 
persons in these towns amounts to two hundred and 
forty-three, of whom more than one fifth are under 
thirty years of age, which period is assigned as the 
limit within which they cannot fail of receiving all 
the benefit to be derived from the system of instruc- 
tion pursued in the institutions for the blind. 

The proportion of the blind to our whole popu- 
lation, as founded on the above estimate, is some- 
what higher than that established by Zeune for the 
corresponding latitudes in Europe, where blindness 
decreases in advancing from the equator to the poles, 
it being computed in Egypt at the rate of one to one 
hundred, and in Norway of one to one thousand, 
which last is conformable to ours. 

Assuming the preceding estimate as the basis, it 
will appear that there are about five hundred bhnd 
persons in the State of Massachusetts at the present 
moment ; and, adopting the census of 1820, there 
could not at that time, according to the same rate, 
be less than sixteen hundred and fifty in all New- 
England, one fifth being under thirty years of age ; 
a number which, as the blind are usually retired 
from public observation, far exceeds what might be 
conceived on a cursory inspection. 



84 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

From the returns it would appear that a large 
proportion of the blind in Massachusetts are in hum- 
ble circumstances, and a still larger proportion of 
those in years indigent or paupers. This is impu- 
table to their having learned no trade or profession 
in their youth, so that, when deprived of their nat- 
ural guardians, they have necessarily become a charge 
upon the public. 

Since the year 1825 an appropriation has been 
continued by the Legislature for the purpose of 
maintaining a certain number of pupils at the Asy- 
lum for the Deaf and Dumb at Hartford. A reso- 
lution was obtained during the last session of the 
General Court authorizing the governor to pay 
over to the Asylum for the Blind whatever balance 
of the sum thus appropriated might remain in the 
treasury unexpended at the end of the current year, 
and the same with every subsequent year to which 
the grant extended, unless otherwise advised. Seven 
hundred dollars only have been received as the bal- 
ance of the past year, a sum obviously inadequate 
to the production of any important result, and far 
inferior to what had been anticipated by the friends 
of the measure. On the whole, we are inclined to 
doubt whether this will be found the most suitable 
mode of creating resources for the asylum. Al- 
though, in fact, it disposes only of the superfluity, 
it has the appearance of subtracting from the posi- 
tive revenues of the Deaf and Dumb, an institution 
of equal merit and claims with any other whatever. 
The Asylum for the Blind is an establishment of 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 85 

too much importance to be left thus dependant on 
a precarious contingent, and is worthy, were it only 
in an economical point of view, of being placed by 
the state on some more secure and ample basis. 

As it is, the want of funds opposes a sensible ob- 
struction to its progress. The pressure of the times 
has made the present moment exceedingly unfavour- 
able to personal solicitation, although so much has 
been effected in this w^ay, through the liberality of 
a few individuals, that, as we understand, prepara- 
tions are now making for procuring the requisite 
instructers and apparatus on a moderate and some- 
what reduced scale. 

As to the comprehensiveness of the scheme of 
education to be pursued at the the asylum, whether 
it shall embrace intellectual culture, or be confined 
simply to the mechanic arts, this must, of course, be 
ultimately determined by the extent of its resources. 
We trust, however, it will be enabled to adopt the 
former arrangement, at least so far as to afford the 
pupils an acquaintance with the elements of the 
more popular sciences. There is such a diffusion 
of liberal knowledge among all classes in this coun- 
try, that if the blind are suffered to go without any 
tincture of it from the institution, they will always, 
whatever be the skill acquired by them in mechan- 
ical occupations, continue to feel a sense of their 
own mental inferiority. The connexion of these 
higher with the more direct objects of the institu- 
tion will serve, moreover, to give it greater dignity 
and importance. And while it will open sources 



86 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of knowledge from which many may be in a situa- 
tion to derive permanent consolation, it will instruct 
the humblest individual in what may be of essential 
utility to him, as writing and arithmetic, for exam- 
ple, in his intercourse with the world. 

To what extent it is desirable that the asylum 
be placed on a charitable foundation is another 
subject of consideration. This, we believe, is the 
character of most of the establishments in Europe. 
That in Scotland, for instance, contains about a 
hundred subjects, who, with their families included, 
amount to two hundred and fifty souls, all support- 
ed from the labours of the blind, conjointly with the 
funds of the institution. This is undoubtedly one 
of the noblest and most discriminating charities in 
the world. It seems probable, however, that this is 
not the plan best adapted to our exigencies. We 
want not to maintain the blind, but to put them in 
the w ay of contributing to their own maintenance. 
By placing the expenses of tuition and board as low 
as possible, the means of effecting this will be brought 
within the reach of a large class of them ; and for 
the rest, it will be obvious economy in the state to 
provide them with the means of acquiring an edu- 
cation at once that may enable them to contribute 
permanently towards their own support, which, in 
some shape or other, is now chargeable on the pub- 
lic. Perhaps, however, some scheme may be de- 
vised for combining both these objects, if this be 
deemed preferable to the adoption of either exclu- 
sively. 



ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 87 

We are convinced that, as far as the institution 
is to rely for its success on pubhc patronage, it will 
not be disappointed. If once successfully in oper- 
ation, and brought before the public eye, it cannot 
fail of exciting a very general sympathy, which, in 
this country, has never been refused to the calls of 
humanity. No one, we think, who has visited the 
similar endowments in Paris or in Edinburgh will 
easily forget the sensations which he experienced 
on witnessing so large a class of his unfortunate 
fellow-creatures thus restored from intellectual dark- 
ness to the blessings, if we may so speak, of light 
and liberty. There is no higher evidence of the 
worth of the human mind than its capacity of draw- 
ing consolation from its own resources under so 
heavy a privation ; so that it not only can exhibit 
resignation and cheerfulness, but energy to burst the 
fetters with which it is encumbered. Who could 
refuse his sympathy to the success of these efforts, 
or withhold from the subject of them the means of 
attaining his natural level and usefulness in society, 
from which circumstances, less favourable to him 
than to ourselves, have hitherto excluded him ? 



88 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



IRVING'S CONQUEST OP GRANADA.^ 

OCTOBER, 182 9. 

Almost as many qualifications may be demanded 
for a perfect historian, indeed the Abbe Mably has 
enumerated as many, as Cicero stipulates for a per- 
fect orator. He must be strictly impartial ; a lover 
of truth under all circumstances, and ready to de- 
clare it at all hazards : he must be deeply conver- 
sant with w^hatever may bring into relief the char- 
acter of the people he is depicting, not merely with 
their laws, constitution, general resources, and all 
the other more visible parts of the machinery of 
government, but with the nicer moral and social re- 
lations, the informing spirit which gives life to the 
whole, but escapes the eye of a vulgar observer. If 
he has to do with other ages and nations, he must 
transport himself into them, expatriating himself, as 
it were, from his own, in order to get the very form 
and pressure of the times he is delineating. He 
must be conscientious in his attention to geogra- 
phy, chronology, &c., an inaccuracy in which has 
been fatal to more than one good philosophical his- 
tory ; and, mixed up with all these drier details, he 
must display the various powers of a novelist or 
dramatist, throwing his characters into suitable lights 
and shades, disposing his scenes so as to awaken 

* " A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada. By Fray Antonia Aga- 
pida." 1829 : 2 vols., 12mo. Philadelphia : Carey, Lea, and Carey. 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA, y 89 

and maintain an unflagging interest, and diffusing 
over the whole that finished style, without which 
his work will only become a magazine of materials 
for the more elegant edifices of subsequent writers. 
He must be — in short, there is no end to what a 
perfect historian must be and do. It is hardly ne- 
cessary to add that such a monster never did and 
never will exist. 

But, although we cannot attain to perfect excel- 
lence in this or any other science in this world, con- 
siderable approaches have been made to it, and dif- 
ferent individuals have arisen at different periods, 
possessed, in an eminent degree, of some of the prin- 
cipal qualities which go to make up the aggregate 
of the character we have been describing. The 
peculiar character of these qualities will generally 
be determined in the writer by that of the age in 
which he lives. Thus, the earlier historians of 
Greece and Rome sought less to instruct than to 
amuse. They filled their pictures with dazzling 
and seductive images. In their researches into an- 
tiquity, they were not startled by the marvellous, 
like the more prudish critics of our day, but wel- 
comed it as likely to stir the imaginations of their 
readers. They seldom interrupted the story by im- 
pertinent reflection. They bestowed infinite pains 
on the costume, the style of their history, and, in 
fine, made everything subordinate to the main pur- 
pose of conveying an elegant and interesting narra- 
tive. Such was Herodotus, such Livy, and such, 
too, the earlier chroniclers of modern Europe, whose 

M 



90 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

pages glow with the picturesque and brilhant pa- 
geants of an age of chivahy. These last, as well 
as Herodotus, may be said to have written in the 
infancy of their nations, when the imagination is 
more willingly addressed than the understanding. 
Livy, who wrote in a riper age, lived, nevertheless, 
in a court and a period where tranquillity and opu- 
lence disposed the minds of men to elegant recrea- 
tion rather than to severe discipline and exertion. 

As, however, the nation advanced in years, or be- 
came oppressed with calamity, history also assumed 
a graver complexion. Fancy gave way to reflec- 
tion. The mind, no longer invited to rove abroad 
in quest of elegant and alluring pictures, was driven 
back upon itself, speculated more deeply, and sought 
for support under the external evils of life in mor- 
al and philosophical truth. Description was aban- 
doned for the study of character; men took the 
place of events; and the romance was converted 
into the drama. Thus it was with Tacitus, who 
lived under those imperial monsters who turned 
Rome into a charnel-house, and his compact nar- 
ratives are filled with moral and political axioms 
sufficiently numerous to make a volume ; and, in- 
deed, Brotier has made one of them in his edition 
of the historian. The same philosophical spirit an- 
imates the page of Thucydides, himself one of the 
principal actors in the long, disastrous struggle that 
terminated in the ruin of his nation. 

But, notwithstanding the deeper and more com- 
prehensive thought of these later writers, there was 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA.^ 91 

Still a wide diiference between the complexion giv- 
en to history under their hands and that which it 
has assumed in our time. We would not be un- 
derstood as determining, but simply as discrimina- 
ting their relative merits. The Greeks and Ro- 
mans lived when the world, at least when the mind 
was in its comparative infancy — when fancy and 
feeling were most easily, and loved most to be ex- 
cited. They possessed a finer sense of beauty than 
the moderns. They were infinitely more sohcitous 
about the external dress, the finish, and all that 
makes up the poetry of a composition. Poetry, in- 
deed, mingled in their daily pursuits as well as pleas- 
ures ; it determined their gravest deliberations. The 
command of their armies was given, not to the best 
general, but ofttimes to the most eloquent orator. 
Poetry entered into their religion, and created those 
beautiful monuments of architecture and sculpture 
which the breath of time has not tarnished. It en- 
tered into their philosophy ; and no one confessed its 
influence more deeply than he who would have ban- 
ished it from his republic. It informed the souls of 
their orators, and prompted those magnificent rhap- 
sodies which fall lifeless enough from the stammer- 
ing tongue of the schoolboy, but which once awaked 
to ecstasy the living populace of Athens. It enter- 
ed deeply even into their latest history. It was first 
exhibited in the national chronicles of Homer. It 
lost little of its colouring, though it conformed to 
the general laws of prosaic composition, under He- 
rodotus. And it shed a pleasing grace over the so- 



92 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ber pages of Thucjdides and Xenophon. The 
muse, indeed, was stripped of her wings. She no 
longer made her airy excursions into the fairy re- 
gions of romance ; but, as she moved along the 
earth, the sweetest wild-flowers seemed to spring 
up unbidden at her feet. We would not be under- 
stood as implying that Grecian history was ambi- 
tious of florid or meretricious ornament. Nothing 
could be more simple than its general plan and ex- 
ecution ; far too simple, we fear, for imitation in 
our day. Thus Thucydides, for example, distrib- 
utes his events most inartificially, according to the 
regular revolutions of the seasons ; and the rear of 
every section is brought up with the same eternal 
repetion of erog tw noXefKj) sTsXevra rG)6e, bv QovKvdtdTjg 
^vvsypaips. But in the fictitious speeches with which 
he has iflumined his narrative, he has left the choi- 
cest specimens of Attic eloquence ; and he elabora- 
ted his general diction into so high a finish, that 
Demosthenes, as is well known, in the hope of 
catching some of his rhetorical graces, thought him 
worthy of being thrice transcribed with his own 
hand. 

Far diflerent has been the general conception, as 
well as execution, of history by the moderns. In 
this, however, it was accommodated to the exigen- 
cies of their situation, and, as with the ancients, 
still reflected the spirit of the age. If the Greeks 
lived in the infancy of civilization, the contempo- 
raries of our day may be said to have readied its 
prime. The same revolution has taken place as in 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 93 

the growth of an individual. The vivacity of the 
imagination has been blunted, but reason is matu- 
red. The credulity of youth has given way to hab- 
its of cautious inquiry, and sometimes to a phleg- 
matic skepticism. The productions, indeed, which 
first appeared in the doubtful twihght of morning 
exhibited the love of the marvellous, the hght and 
fanciful spirit of a green and tender age. But a 
new order of things commenced as the stores of 
classical learning were unrolled to the eye of the 
scholar. The mind seemed at once to enter upon 
the rich inheritance which the sages of antiquity 
had been ages in accumulating, and to start, as it 
were, from the very point where they had termina- 
ted their career. Thus raised by learning and ex- 
perience, it was enabled to take a wider view of 
its proper destiny — to understand that truth is the 
greatest good, and to discern the surest method of 
arriving at it. The Christian doctrine, too, incul- 
cated that the end of being was best answered by 
a life of active usefulness, and not by one of ab- 
stract contemplation, or selfish indulgence, or pass- 
ive fortitude, as variously taught by the various 
sects of antiquity. Hence a new standard of mor- 
al excellence was formed. Pursuits were estima- 
ted by their practical results, and the useful was 
preferred to the ornamental. Poetry, confined to 
her own sphere, was no longer permitted to mingle 
in the councils of philosophy. Intellectual and 
physical science, instead of floating on vague spec- 
ulation, as with the ancients, was estabhshed on 



94 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

careful induction and experiment The orator, in- 
stead of adorning himself with the pomp and gar- 
niture of verse, sought only to acquire greater dex- 
terity in the management of the true weapons of 
debate. The passions were less frequently assail- 
ed, the reason more. A wider field was open to 
the historian. He was no longer to concoct his 
narrative, if the scene lay in a remote period, from 
the superficial rumours of oral tradition. Libra- 
ries were to be ransacked ; medals and monuments 
to be studied; obsolete manuscripts to be decipher- 
ed. Every assertion was to be fortified by an au- 
thority ; and the opinions of others, instead of be- 
ing admitted on easy faith, were to be carefully col- 
lated, and the balance of probability struck between 
them. With these qualifications of antiquarian and 
critic, the modern historian was to combine that of 
the philosopher, deducing from his mass of facts 
general theorems, and giving to them their most 
extended application. 

By all this process, poetry lost much, but philos- 
ophy gained more. The elegant arts sensibly de- 
clined, but the most important and recondite secrets 
of nature were laid open. All those sciences which 
have for their object the happiness and improvement 
of the species, the science of government, of politi- 
cal economy, of education — ^natural and experiment- 
al science — were carried far beyond the boundaries 
which they could possibly have reached under the 
ancient systems. 

The peculiar forms of historic writing, as it ex- 



IRVING S CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 95 

ists with the moderns, were not fully developed un- 
til the last century. It may be well to notice the in- 
termediate shape which it assumed before it reach- 
ed this period in Spain and Italy, but especially this 
latter country, in the sixteenth century. The Ital- 
ian historians of that age seemed to have combined 
the generalizing and reflecting spirit characteristic 
of the moderns, with the simple and graceful forms 
of composition which have descended to us from 
the ancients. Machiavelli, in particular, may re- 
mind us of some recent statue which exhibits all 
the lineaments and proportions of a contemporary, 
but to which the sculptor has given a sort of an- 
tique dignity by enveloping it in the folds of the 
Roman toga. No one of the Spanish historians is 
to be named with him. Mariana, who enjoys among 
them the greatest celebrity, has, it is true, given to 
his style, both in the Latin and CastiHan, the ele- 
gant transparency of an ancient classic, but the mass 
of detail is not quickened by a single spark of phi- 
losophy or original reflection. Mariana was a monk, 
one of a community who have formed the most co- 
pious, but, in many respects, the most incompetent 
chroniclers in the world, cut ofl*, as they are, from 
all sympathy with any portion of the species save 
their own order, and predisposed by education to 
admit as truth the grossest forgeries of fanaticism. 
What can their narratives be worth, distorted thus 
by prejudice and credulity 1 The Aragonese wri- 
ters, and Zurita in particular, though far inferior as 
to the literary execution of their works, exhibit a 



96 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

pregnant thought and a manly independence of ex- 
pression far superior to the Jesuit Mariana. 

The ItaUan historians of the sixteenth century, 
moreover, had the good fortune not only to have 
been eyewitnesses, but to have played prominent 
parts in the events which they commemorated. 
And this gives a vitality to their touches which is 
in vain to be expected from those of a closet poli- 
tician. This rare union of public and private ex- 
cellence is delicately intimated in the inscription 
on Guicciardini's monument, ''Cujus negotium, an 
oiiian, gloriosius incertumr 

The personage by whom the present laws of his- 
toric composition may be said to have been first ar- 
ranged into a regular system was Voltaire. This 
extraordinary genius, whose w^orks have been pro- 
ductive of so much mingled good and evil, discov- 
ers in them many traces of a humane and beneficent 
disposition. Nowhere is his invective more keenly 
directed than against acts of cruelty and oppres- 
sion — above all, of religious oppression. He lived 
in an age of crying abuses both in Church and gov- 
ernment. Unfortunately, he employed a weapon 
against them whose influence is not to be control- 
led by the most expert hand. The envenomed 
shaft of irony not only wounds the member at 
which it is aimed, but diffuses its poison to the 
healthiest and remotest regions of the body. 

The free and volatile temper of Voltaire forms a 
singular contrast with his resolute pertinacity of 
purpose. Bard, philosopher, historian, this literary 



IRVING*S CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 97 

Proteus animated every shape with the same mis- 
chievous spirit of philosophy. It never deserted 
him, even in the most sportive sallies of his fancy. 
It seasons his romances equally with his gravest 
pieces in the encyclopedia ; his familiar letters and 
most Hcentious doggerel no less than his histories. 
The leading object of this philosophy may be de- 
fined by the single cant phrase, " the abolition of 
prejudices." But in Voltaire prejudices were too 
often confounded with principles. 

In his histories, he seems ever intent on exhibit- 
ing, in the most glaring colours, the manifold incon- 
sistencies of the human race ; in showing the con- 
tradiction between profession and practice ; in con- 
trasting the magnificence of the apparatus with the 
impotence of the results. The enormous abuses of 
Christianity are brought into juxtaposition with the 
most meritorious features in other religions, and 
thus all are reduced to nearly the same level. The 
credulity of one half of mankind is set in opposition 
to the cunning of the other. The most momentous 
events are traced to the most insignificant causes, 
and the ripest schemes of wisdom are shown to 
have been baffled by the intervention of the most 
trivial accidents. Thus the conduct of the world 
seems to be regulated by chance ; the springs of 
human action are resolved into selfishness ; and re- 
ligion, of whatever denomination, is only a different 
form of superstition. It is true that his satire is 
directed not so much against any particular system 
as the vices of that system ; but the result left upon 

N 



98 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the niind is not a whit less pernicious. His philo- 
sophical romance of " Candide" affords a good ex- 
ernphfication of his manner. The thesis of perfect 
optimism in this world, at which he levels ihisjeu 
d' esprit, is manifestly indefensible. Bat then he 
supports his position with such an array of gross 
and hyperbolical atrocities, without the intervention 
of a single palliative circumstance, and, withal, in 
such a tone of keen derision, that, if any serious im- 
pression be left on the mind, it can be no other than 
that of a baleful, withering skepticism. The histo- 
rian rarely so far forgets his philosophy as to kindle 
into high and generous emotion the glow of patri- 
otism, or moral and religious enthusiasm. And 
hence, too, his style, though always graceful, and 
often seasoned with the sallies of a piquant wit, 
never rises into eloquence or sublimity. 

Voltaire has been frequently reproached for want 
of historical accuracy. But if we make due allow- 
ance for the sweeping tenour of his reflections, and 
for the infinite variety of his topics, we shall be 
slow in giving credit to this charge."^ He was, in- 
deed, oftentimes misled by his inveterate Pyrrho- 
nism ; a defect, when carried to the excess in which 
he indulged it, almost equally fatal to the historian 
with credulity or superstition. His researches fre- 
quently led him into dark, untravelled regions ; but 
the aliment which he imported thence served only 

* Indeed, Hallam and Warton — the one as diligent a labourer in the 
field of civil history as the other has been in literary — both bear testi- 
mony to his general veracity. 



IRVING*S CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 99 

too often to minister to his pernicious philosophy. 
He resembled the allegorical agents of Milton, pa- 
ving a way across the gulf of Chaos for the spirits 
of mischief to enter more easily upon the earth. 

Voltaire effected a no less sensible revolution in 
the structure than in the spirit of history. Thus, 
instead of following the natural consecutive order 
of events, the work was distributed, on the princi- 
ple of a Catalogue raisonne, into sections arranged 
according to their subjects, and copious disserta- 
tions were introduced into the body of the narra- 
tive. Thus, in his ^ssai sur les Mwurs, &c., one 
chapter is devoted to letters, another to religion, a 
third to manners, and so on. And in the same way, 
in his "Age of Louis the Fourteenth," he has thrown 
his various illustrations of the policy of government, 
and of the social habits of the court, into a detach- 
ed portion at the close of the book. 

This would seem to be deviating from the natu- 
ral course of things as they occur in the world, 
where the multifarious pursuits of pleasure and bu- 
siness, the lights and shadows, as it were, of life, 
are daily intermingled in the motley panorama of 
human existence. But, however artificial this di- 
vision, it enabled the reader to arrive more expedi- 
tiously at the results, for which alone history is val- 
uable, while, at the same time, it put it in the power 
of the writer to convey with more certainty and fa- 
cility his own impressions. 

This system was subsequently so much refined 
upon, that Montesquieu, in his " Grandeur et Deca- 



100 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, 

deuce des Romains," laid no farther stress on his- 
torical facts than as they furnished him with illus- 
trations of his particular theorems. Indeed, so lit- 
tle did his work rest upon the veracity of such facts, 
that, although the industry of Niebuhr, or, rather, of 
Beaufort, has knocked away almost all the founda- 
tions of early Rome, Montesquieu's treatise remains 
as essentially unimpaired in credit as before. Thus 
the materials which anciently formed the body of 
history now served only as ingredients from which 
its spirit was to be extracted. But this was not al- 
ways the spirit of truth. And the arbitrary selection 
as well as disposition of incidents which this new 
method allowed, and the colouring which they were 
to receive from the author, made it easy to pervert 
them to the construction of the wildest hypotheses. 
The progress of philosophical history is particu- 
larly observable in Great Britain, where it seems to 
have been admirably suited to the grave, reflecting 
temper of the people. In the graces of narrative 
they have ever been unequal to their French neigh- 
bours. Their ancient chronicles are inferior in spirit 
and execution to those either of France or Spain ; 
and their more elaborate histories, down to the mid- 
dle of the eighteenth century, could not in any way 
compete with the illustrious models of Italy. But 
soon after this period several writers appeared, ex- 
hibiting a combination of qualities, erudition, criti- 
cal penetration, powers of generalization, and a po- 
litical sagacity unrivalled in any other age or coun- 
try. 



IRVING's conquest of GRANADA. 101 

The influence of the new forms of historical com- 
position, however, was here, as elsewhere, made too 
frequently subservient to party and sectarian preju- 
dices. Tory histories and Whig histories, Prot- 
estant and Catholic histories, successively appear- 
ed, and seemed to neutralize each other. The most 
venerable traditions were exploded as nursery tales. 
The statues decreed by antiquity were cast down, 
and the characters of miscreants whom the general 
suffrage of mankind had damned to infamy — of a 
Dionysius, a Borgia, or a Richard the Third — were 
now retraced by what Jovius distinguishes as " the 
golden pen" of the historian, until the reader, bewil- 
dered in the maze of uncertainty, is almost ready to 
join in the exclamation of Lord Orford to his son, "Oh 
quote me not history, for that I know to be false !'[\ 
It is remarkable, indeed, that the last-mentioned mon- 
arch, Richard the Third, whose name has become a 
byword of atrocity, the burden of the ballad and 
the moral of the drama, should have been the sub- 
ject of elaborate vindication by two eminent writers 
of the most opposite characters, the pragmatical Hor- 
ace Walpole, and the circumspect and conscientious 
Sharon Turner. The apology of the latter exhib- 
its a technical precision, a severe scrutiny into the 
authenticity of records, and a nice balancing of con- 
tradictory testimony, that give it all the air of a legal 
investigation. Thus history seems to be conducted 
on the principles of a judicial process, in which the 
writer, assuming the functions of an advocate, stu- 
diously suppresses whatever may make against his 

(J 



102 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

own side, supports himself by the strongest array of 
evidence which he can muster, discredits, as far as 
possible, that of the opposite party, and, by dexter- 
ous interpretation and ingenious inference, makes 
out the most plausible argument for his client that 
the case will admit. 

But these, after all, are only the abuses of philo- 
sophical history, and the unseasonable length of re- 
mark into which we have been unwarily led in re- 
spect to them may give us the appearance of laying 
on them greater emphasis than they actually de- 
serve. There are few writers in any country whose 
judgment has not been sometimes warped by per- 
sonal prejudices. But it is to the credit of the prin- 
cipal British historians that, however they may have 
been occasionally under the influence of such hu- 
man infirmity, they have conducted their researches, 
in the main, with equal integrity and impartiality. 
And while they have enriched their writings with 
the stores of a various erudition, they have digested 
from these details results of the most enlarged and 
practical application. History in their hands, al- 
though it may have lost much of the simphcity and 
graphic vivacity which it maintained with the an- 
cients, has gained much more in the amount of use- 
ful knowledge and the lessons of sound philosophy 
which it inculcates. 

There is no writer who exhibits more distinctly 
the full development of the principles of modern 
history, with all its virtues and defects, than Gib- 
bon. His learning was fully equal to his vast sub- 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 103 

ject. This, commencing with expiring civiUzation 
in ancient Rome, continues on until the period of 
its final and perfect resurrection in Italy in the fif- 
teenth century, and thus may be said to furnish the 
lights which are to guide us through the long in- 
terval of darkness which divides the Old from the 
Modern world. The range of his subject was fully 
equal to its duration. Goths, Huns, Tartars, and 
all the rude tribes of the North, are brought upon 
the stage, together with the more cultivated natives 
of the South, the Greeks, Itahans, and the intellect- 
ual Arab; and, as the scene shifts from one country 
to another, we behold its population depicted with 
that peculiarity of physiognomy and studied pro- 
priety of costume which belong to dramatic exhi- 
bition ; for Gibbon was a more vivacious draughts- 
man than most writers of his school. He was, 
moreover, deeply versed in geography, chronology, 
antiquities, verbal criticism — in short, in all the sci- 
ences in any way subsidiary to his art. The ex- 
tent of his subject permitted him to indulge in those 
elaborate disquisitions so congenial to the spirit of 
modern history on the most momentous and inter- 
esting topics, while his early studies enabled him to 
embellish the drier details of his narrative with the 
charms of a liberal and elegant scholarship. 

What, then, was wanting to this accomplished 
writer ? Good faith. His defects were precisely 
of the class of which we have before been speak- 
ing, and his most elaborate efforts exhibit too often 
the perversion of learning and ingenuity to the vin- 



104 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

dication of preconceived hypotheses. He cannot, 
indeed, be convicted of ignorance or Hteral inaccu- 
racy, as he has triumphantly proved in his discom- 
fiture of the unfortunate Davis. But his disingen- 
uous mode of conducting the argument leads pre- 
cisely to the same unfair result. Thus, in his cel- 
ebrated chapters on the " Progress of Christianity," 
w^hich he tells us were " reduced by three success- 
ive revisals from a bulky volume to their present 
size," he has often slurred over in the text such par- 
ticulars as might reflect most credit on the charac- 
ter of the religion, or shuffled them into a note at 
the bottom of the page, while all that admits of a 
doubtful complexion in its early propagation is os- 
tentatiously blazoned, and set in contrast to the most 
amiable features of paganism. At the same time, by 
a style of innuendo that conveys "more than meets 
the ear," he has contrived, w^ith lago-like duplicity, 
to breathe a taint of suspicion on the purity which he 
dares not openly assail. It would be easy to furnish 
examples of all this were this the place for them ; 
but the charges have no novelty, and have been 
abundantly substantiated by others. 

It is a consequence of this skepticism in Gibbon, 
as with Voltaire, that his writings are nowhere 
warmed with a generous moral sentiment. The 
most sublime of all spectacles, that of the martyr 
who suffers for conscience sake, and this equally 
whether his creed be founded in truth or error, is 
contemplated by the historian with the smile, or, 
rather, sneer of philosophic indifference. This is 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 105 

not only bad taste, as he is addressing a Christian 
audience, but he thus voluntarily relinquishes one 
of the most powerful engines for the movement of 
human passion, w^hich is never so easily excited as 
by deeds of suffering, self-devoted heroism. 

But, although Gibbon wsls wholly defective in 
moral enthusiasm, his style is vivified by a certain ex- 
hilarating glow that kindles a corresponding warmth 
in the bosom of his reader. This may, perhaps, be 
traced to his egotism, or, to speak more liberally, to 
an ardent attachment to his professional pursuits, 
and to his inextinguishable love of letters. This 
enthusiasm appears in almost every page of his great 
work, and enabled him to triumph over all its diffi- 
culties. It is particularly conspicuous whenever 
he touches upon Rome, the alma mater of science, 
whose adopted son he may be said to have been 
from his earliest boyhood. Whenever he contem- 
plates her fallen fortunes, he mourns over her with 
the fond solicitude that might become an ancient 
Roman ; and when he depicts her pristine glories, 
dimly seen through the mist of so many centuries, 
he does it with such vivid accuracy of conception, 
that the reader, like the traveller who wanders 
through the excavations of Pompeii, seems to be 
gazing on the original forms and brilliant colours 
of antiquity. 

To Gibbon's egotism — in its most literal sense, 
to his personal vanity — may be traced some of the 
peculiar defects for which his style is conspicuous. 
The " historian of the Decline and Fall" too rarely 

O 



106 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

forgets his own importance in that of his subject. 
The consequence which he attaches to his personal 
labours is shown in a bloated dignity of expression, 
and an ostentation of ornament that contrast whim- 
sically enough with the trifling topics and common- 
place thoughts on which, in the course of his long 
work, they are occasionally employed. He no- 
where moves along with the easy freedom of na- 
ture, but seems to leap, as it were, from triad to 
triad by a succession of strained, convulsive efforts. 
He affected, as he tells us, the light, festive raillery 
of Voltaire ; but his cumbrous imitation of the mer- 
curial Frenchman may remind one, to make use of 
a homely simile, of the ass in iEsop's fable, who 
frisked upon his master in imitation of the sportive 
gambols of the spaniel. The first two octavo vol- 
umes of Gibbon's history were written in a compar- 
atively modest and unaffected manner, for he was 
then uncertain of the public favour ; and, indeed, 
his style was exceedingly commended by the most 
competent critics of that day, as Hume, Joseph War- 
ton, and others, as is abundantly shown in their cor- 
respondence ; but when he had tasted the sweets of 
popular applause, and had been crowned as the his- 
torian of the day, his increased consequence becomes 
at once visible in the assumed stateliness and mag- 
nificence of his bearing. But even after this period, 
whenever the subject is suited to his style, and when 
his phlegmatic temper is warmed by those generous 
emotions, of which, as we have said, it was some- 
times susceptible, he exhibits his ideas in the most 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 107 

splendid and imposing forms of which the EngUsh 
language is capable. 

The most eminent illustrations of the system of 
historical writing, which we have been discussing, 
that have appeared in England in the present cen- 
tury, are the works of Mr. Hallam, in which the 
author, discarding most of the circumstances that 
go to make up mere narrative, endeavours to fix the 
attention of the reader on the more important fea- 
tures of constitutional polity, employing his wide 
range of materials in strict subordination to this 
purpose. 

But while history has thus been conducted on 
nearly the same principles in England for the last 
century, a new path has been struck out in France, 
or, rather, an attempt has lately been made there to 
retrace the old one. M. de Barante, no less estima- 
ble as a literary critic than as a historian, in the pre- 
liminary remarks to his "Histoire des Dues de Bour- 
gogne," considers the draughts of modern compilers 
as altogether wanting in the vivacity and freshness 
of their originals. They tell the reader how he 
should feel, instead of making him do so. They 
give him their own results, instead of enabling him, 
by a fair delineation of incidents, to form his own. 
And while the early chroniclers, in spite of their un- 
formed and obsolete idiom, are still read with delight, 
the narratives of the former are too often dry, lan- 
guid, and uninteresting. He proposes, therefore, by 
a close adherence to his originals, to extract, as it 
were, the spirit of their works, without any affecta- 



108 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tion, however, of their antiquated phraseology, and 
to exhibit as vivid and veracious a portraiture as 
possible of the times he is delineating, unbroken by 
any discussions or reflections of his own. The re- 
sult has been a work in eleven octavo volumes, 
which, notwithstanding its bulk, has already passed 
into four editions. 

The two last productions of our countryman, Mr. 
Irving, undoubtedly fall within the class of narrative 
history. To this he seems peculiarly suited by his 
genius, his fine perception of moral and natural 
beauty, his power of discriminating the most deli- 
cate shades of character, and of unfolding a series 
of events so as to maintain a lively interest in the 
reader, and a lactea uhertas of expression which can 
impart a living eloquence even to the most common- 
place sentiments. Had the " Life of Columbus" 
been written by a historian of the other school of 
which we have been speaking, he would have en- 
larged with greater circumstantiality on the system 
adopted by Ferdinand and Isabella for the adminis- 
tration of their colonies, and for the regulation of 
trade ; nor would he have neglected to descant on 
a topic, worn somewhat threadbare, it must be own- 
ed, so momentous as the moral and political conse- 
quences of the discovery of America; neither would 
such a writer, in an account of the conquest of 
Granada, have omitted to collect such particulars 
as might throw light on the genius, social institu- 
tions, and civil polity of the Spanish Arabs. But 
all these particulars, however pertinent to a philo- 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 109 

sophical history, would have been entirely out of 
keeping in Mr. Irving's, and might have produced a 
disagreeable discordance in the general harmony of 
his plan. 

Mr. Irving has seldom selected a subject better 
suited to his peculiar powers than the conquest of 
Granada. Indeed, it would hardly have been pos- 
sible for one of his warm sensibilities to linger so 
long among the remains of Moorish magnificence 
with which Spain is covered, without being inter- 
ested in the fortunes of a people whose memory has 
almost passed into oblivion, but who once preserved 
the " sacred flame" when it had become extinct in 
every corner of Christendom, and whose influence 
is still visible on the intellectual culture of Modern 
Europe. It has been found no easy matter, how- 
ever, to compile a satisfactory and authentic account 
of the Arabians, notwithstanding that the number 
of their historians, cited by D'Herbelot and Casiri, 
would appear to exceed that of any European na- 
tion. The despotic governments of the East have 
never been found propitious to that independence 
of opinion so essential to historical composition : 
"ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet." 
And their copious compilations, prolific in frivolous 
and barren detail, are too often wholly destitute of 
the sap and vitality of history. 

The social and moral institutions of Arabian 
Spain experienced a considerable modification from 
her long intercourse with the Europeans, and she 
offers a nobler field of research for the chronicler 



110 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

than is to be found in any other country of the 
Moslem. Notwithstanding this, the Castihan schol- 
ars, until of late, have done little towards elucidating 
the national antiquities of their Saracen brethren ; 
and our most copious notices of their political his- 
tory, until the recent posthumous publication of 
Conde, have been drawn from the extracts which 
M. Cardonne translated from the Arabic Manu- 
scripts in the Royal Library at Paris.* 

The most interesting periods of the Saracen do- 
minion in Spain are that embraced by the empire 
of the Omeyades of Cordova, between the years 
755 and 1030, and that of the kingdom of Granada, 
extending from the middle of the thirteenth to the 
close of the fifteenth century. The intervening pe- 
riod of their existence in the Peninsula offers only a 
spectacle of inextricable anarchy. The first of those 
periods was that in which the Arabs attained their 
meridian of opulence and power, and in which their 
general illumination affords a striking contrast with 
the deep barbarism of the rest of Europe; but it 
was that, too, in which their character, having been 
but little affected by contact w^ith the Spaniards, re- 
tained most of its original Asiatic peculiarities. This 
has never been regarded, therefore, by European 
scholars, as a period of greatest interest in their his- 

* [Since this article was written, the deficiency noticed in the text has 
been supplied by the translation into English of Al-Makkari's "Moham- 
medan Dynasties," with copious notes and illustrations by Don Pascual 
de Gayangos, a scholar whose acute criticism has enabled him to rectify 
many of the errors of his laborious predecessors, and whose profound 
Oriental learning sheds a flood of light on both the civil and literary his- 
tory of the Spanish Arabs.] 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. Ill 

tory, nor has it ever, so far as we are aware, been 
selected for the purposes of romantic fiction. But 
when their territories became reduced within the 
limits of Granada, the Moors had insensibly submit- 
ted to the superior influences of their Christian 
neighbours. Their story, at this time, abounds in 
passages of uncommon beauty and interest. Their 
wars were marked by feats of personal prowess and 
romantic adventure, while the intervals of peace 
were abandoned to all the license of luxurious rev- 
elry. Their character, therefore, blending the va- 
rious peculiarities of Oriental and European civili- 
zation, offers a rich study for the poet and the nov- 
elist. As such, it has been liberally employed by 
the Spaniards, and has not been altogether neglect- 
ed by the writers of other nations. Thus Florian, 
whose sentiments, as well as his style, seem to be 
always floundering midway between the regions of 
prose and poetry, has made out of the stQry of this 
people his popular romance of " Gonsalvo of Cor- 
dova." It also forms the burden of an Italian epic, 
entitled "II Conquista di Granata," by Girolamo 
Gratiani, a Florentine — much lauded by his coun- 
trymen. The ground, however, before the appear- 
ance of Mr. Irving, had not been occupied by any 
writer of eminence in the Enghsh language for the 
purposes either of romance or history. 

The conquest of Granada, to which Mr. Irving 
has confined himself, so disastrous to the Moors, 
was one of the most briUiant achievements in the 
most brilUant period of Spanish history. Nothing is 



112 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

more usual than overweening commendations of 
antiquity ; the " good old times," whose harsher fea- 
tures, like those of a rugged landscape, lose all their 
asperity in the distance. But the period of which 
we are speaking, embracing the reigns of Ferdinand 
and Isabella, at the close of the fifteenth and begin- 
ning of the sixteenth centuries, was undoubtedly 
that in which the Spanish nation displayed the ful- 
ness of its moral and physical energies, when, esca- 
ping from the license of a youthful age, it seems to 
have reached the prime of manhood and the perfect 
development of those faculties, whose overstrained 
exertions were soon to be followed by exhaustion 
and premature decrepitude. 

The remnant of Spaniards, who, retreating to the 
mountains of the north, escaped the overwhelming 
inundation of the Saracens at the beginning of the 
eighth century, continued to cherish the free insti- 
tutions of their Gothic ancestors. The " Fuero 
Juzgo," the ancient Visi-Gothic code, was still re- 
tained by the people of Castile and Leon, and may 
be said to form the basis of all their subsequent le- 
gislation, while in Aragon the dissolution of the 
primitive monarchy opened the way for even more 
liberal and equitable forms of government. The in- 
dependence of character thus fostered by the pecu- 
liar constitutions of these petty states, wrs still far- 
ther promoted by the circumstances of their situ- 
ation. Their uninterrupted wars with the infidel — 
the necessity of winning back from him, inch by 
inch, as it were, the conquered soil — required the 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 113 

active co-operation of every class of the communi- 
ty, and gave to the mass of the people an intrepidi- 
ty, a personal consequence, and an extent of immu- 
nities, such as were not enjoyed by them in any 
other country of Europe. The free cities acquired 
considerable tracts of the reconquered territory, 
with rights of jurisdiction over them, and sent their 
representatives to Cortes, near a century before a 
similar privilege was conceded to them in England. 
Even the peasantry, so degraded, at this period, 
throughout the rest of Europe, assumed under this 
state of things a conscious dignity and importance, 
which are visible in their manners at this day ; and 
it was in this class, during the late French inva- 
sions, that the fire of ancient patriotism revived with 
greatest force, when it seemed almost extinct in the 
breasts of the degenerate nobles. 

The religious feeling which mingled in their wars 
with the infidels, gave to their characters a tinge of 
lofty enthusiasm ; and the irregular nature of this 
warfare suggested abundant topics for that popular 
minstrelsy which acts so powerfully on the passions 
of a people. The " Poem of the Cid," which ap- 
peared, according to Sanchez, before the middle of 
the twelfth century, contributed, in no slight degree, 
by calling up the most inspiring national recollec 
tions, to keep ahve the generous glow of patriotism. 
This influence is not imaginary. Heeren pronoun- 
ces the " poems of Homer to have been the princi- 
pal bond which united the Grecian states;" and 
every one knows the influence exercised over the 

P 



114 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Scottish peasantry by the Border minstrelsy. Many 
anecdotes might be quoted to show the veneration 
universally entertained by the Spaniards, broken, as 
they were, into as many discordant states as ever 
swarmed over Greece, for their favourite hero of ro- 
mance and history. Among others, Mariana relates 
one of a king of Navarre, who, making an incursion 
into Castile about a century after the warrior's 
death, was carr'ying off a rich booty, when he was 
met by an abbot of a neighbouring convent, with 
his monks, bearing aloft the standard of the Cid, 
who implored him to restore the plunder to the in- 
habitants from whom he had ravished it. And the 
monarch, moved by the sight of the sacred relic, 
after complying with his request, escorted back the 
banner in solemn procession with his whole army 
to the place of its deposite. 

But, while all these circumstances conspired to 
give an uncommon elevation to the character of the 
ancient Spaniard, even of the humblest rank, and 
while the prerogative of the monarch was more pre- 
cisely as well as narrowly defined, than in most of 
the other nations of Christendom, the aristocracy of 
the country was insensibly extending its privileges, 
and laying the foundation of a power that eventu- 
ally overshadowed the throne, and wellnigh sub- 
verted the liberties of the state. In addition to the 
usual enormous immunities claimed by this order in 
feudal governments (although there is no reason to 
beheve that the system of feudal tenure obtained in 
Castile, as it certainly did in Aragon), they enjoyed 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 115 

a constitutional privilege of withdrawing their alle- 
giance from their sovereign on sending him a formal 
notice of such renunciation, and the sovereign, on 
his part, was obliged to provide for the security of 
their estates and families so long as they might 
choose to continue in such overt rebelUon. These 
anarchical provisions in their Constitution did not 
remain a dead letter, and repeated examples of their 
pernicious application are enumerated both by the 
historians of Aragon and Castile. The long minor- 
ities with which the latter country was afflicted, 
moreover, contributed still farther to swell the over- 
grown power of the privileged orders ; and the vio- 
lent revolution which, in 1368^ placed the house of 
Trastamarre upon the throne, by impairing the rev- 
enues, and consequently the authority of the crown, 
opened the way for the wild uproar which reigned 
throughout the kingdom during the succeeding cen- 
tury. Alonso de Palencia, a contemporary chron- 
icler, dwells with melancholy minuteness on the 
calamities of this unhappy period, when the whole 
country was split into factions of the nobles, the 
monarch openly contemned, the commons trodden 
in the dust, the court become a brothel, the treasury 
bankrupt, public faith a jest, and private morals too 
loose and audacious to court even the veil of hy- 
pocrisy. 

The wise administration of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella could alone have saved the state in this hour 
of peril. It effected, indeed, a change on the face 
of things as magical as that produced by the wand 



116 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of an enchanter in some Eastern tale. Their reign 
wears a more glorious aspect from its contrast with 
the turbulent period which preceded it, as the land- 
scape glows with redoubled brilliancy when the sun- 
shine has scattered the tempest. We shall briefly 
notice some of the features of the policy by which 
they effected this change. 

They obtained from the Cortes an act for the re- 
sumption of the improvident grants made by their 
predecessor, by which means an immense accession 
of revenue, which had been squandered upon un- 
worthy favourites, was brought back to the royal 
treasury. They compelled many of the nobility to 
resign, in favour of the crown, such of its posses- 
sions as they had acquired by force, fraud, or in- 
trigue, during the late season of anarchy. The son 
of that gallant Marquis Duke of Cadiz, for instance, 
with whom the reader has become so famihar in 
Mr. Irving's Chronicle, was stripped of his patri- 
mony of Cadiz, and compelled to exchange it for 
the humbler territory of Arcos, from whence the 
family henceforth derived their title. By all these 
expedients, the revenues of the state, at the demise 
of Isabella, were increased twelvefold beyond what 
they had been at the time of her accession. They 
reorganized the ancient institution of the "Herman- 
dad" — a very different association, under their hands, 
from the " Holy Brotherhood" which we meet with 
in Gil Bias. Every hundred householders were 
obliged to equip and maintain a horseman at theii 
joint expense; and this corps furnished a vigilant 



IRVING's conquest of GRANADA. 117 

police in civil emergencies, and an effectual aid in 
war. It was found, moreover, of especial service in 
suppressing the insurrections and disorders of the 
nobility. They were particularly solicitous to abol- 
ish the right and usage of private war, claimed by 
this haughty order, compelUng them, on all occa- 
sions, to refer their disputes to the constituted tri- 
bunals of justice. But it was a capital feature in the 
poUcy of the Catholic sovereigns to counterbalance 
the authority of the aristocracy by exalting, as far 
as prudent, that of the commons. In the various 
convocations of the national Legislature, or Cortes, 
in this reign, no instance occurs of any city having 
lost its prescriptive right of furnishing representa- 
tives, as had frequently happened under preceding 
monarchs, who, from negligence or policy, had omit- 
ted to summon them. 

But it would be tedious to go into all the details 
of the system employed by Ferdinand and Isabella 
for the regeneration of the decayed fabric of govern- 
ment ; of their wholesome regulations for the en- 
couragement of industry ; of their organization of a 
national militia and an efficient marine; of the se- 
vere decorum which they introduced within the 
corrupt precincts of the court ; of the temporary 
economy by which they controlled the pubhc ex- 
penditures, and of the munificent patronage which 
they, or, rather, their almoner on this occasion, that 
most enlightened of bigots, Cardinal Ximenes, dis- 
pensed to science and letters. In short, their saga- 
cious provisions were not merely remedial of former 



118 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

abuses, but were intended to call forth all the latent 
energies of the Spanish character, and, with these 
excellent materials, to erect a constitution of gov- 
ernment which should secure to the nation tran- 
quillity at home, and enable it to go forward in its 
ambitious career of discovery and conquest. 

The results were certainly equal to the wisdom 
of the preparations. The first of the series of brill- 
iant enterprises was the conquest of the Moorish 
kingdom of Granada — those rich and lovely regions 
of the Peninsula, the last retreat of the infidel, and 
which he had held for nearly eight centuries. This, 
together with the subsequent occupation of Navarre 
by the crafty Ferdinand, consolidated the various 
principalities of Spain into one monarchy, and, by 
extending its boundaries in the Peninsula to their 
present dimensions, raised it from a subordinate sit- 
uation to the first class of European powers. The 
Italian wars, under the conduct of the " Great Cap- 
tain," secured to Spain the more specious, but less 
useful acquisition of Naples, and formed that invin- 
cible infantry which enabled Charles the Fifth to 
dictate laws to Europe for nearly half a century. 
And, lastly, as if the Old World could not afford a 
theatre sufficiently vast for their ambition, Colum- 
bus gave a New World to Castile and Leon. 

Such was the attitude assumed by the nation un- 
der the Catholic kings, as they were called. It was 
the season of hope and youthful enterprise, when 
the nation seemed to be renewing its ancient ener- 
gies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course. 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 119 

The modern Spaniard who casts his eye over the 
long interval that has since elapsed, during the first 
half of which the nation seemed to waste itself on 
schemes of mad ambition or fierce fanaticism, and, 
in the latter half to sink into a state of paralytic 
torpor — ^the Spaniard, we say, who casts a melan- 
choly glance over this dreary interval, will turn with 
satisfaction to the close of the fifteenth century as 
the most glorious epoch in the annals of his coun- 
try. This is the period to which Mr. Irving has 
introduced us in his late work. And if his portrai- 
ture of the Castilian of that day wears somewhat of 
a romantic, and, it may be, incredible aspect to 
those who contrast it with the present, they must 
remember that he is only reviving the tints which 
had faded on the canvass of history. But it is time 
that w^e should return from this long digression, into 
which we have been led by the desire of exhibiting 
in stronger relief some peculiarities in the situation 
and spirit of the nation at the period from which 
Mr. Irving has selected the materials of his last, in- 
deed, his last two publications. 

Our author, in his " Chronicle of Granada," has 
been but sHghtly indebted to Arabic authorities. 
Neither Conde nor Cardonne has expended more 
than fifty or sixty pages on this humihating topic, 
but ample amends have been offered in the copious 
prolixity of the Castilian writers. The Spaniards 
can boast a succession of chronicles from the period 
of the great Saracen invasion. Those of a more 
early date, compiled in rude Latin, are sufficiently 



120 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

meager and unsatisfactory ; but from the middle of 
the thirteenth century the stream of history runs full 
and clear, and their chronicles, composed in the 
vernacular, exhibit a richness and picturesque vari- 
ety of incident that gave them inestimable value as 
a body of genuiue historical documents. The reigns 
of Ferdinand and Isabella were particularly fruitful 
in these sources of information. History then, like 
most of the other departments of hterature, seemed 
to be in a state of transition, when the fashions of 
its more antiquated costume began to mingle insen- 
sibly with the peculiarities of the modern ; when, in 
short, the garrulous graces of narration were begin- 
ning to be tempered by the tone of grave and philo- 
sophical reflection. 

We will briefly notice a few of the eminent sour- 
ces from which Mr. Irving has drawn his account of 
the " Conquest of Granada." The first of these is 
the Epistles of Peter Martyr, an Italian savant, who, 
having passed over with the Spanish ambassador 
into Spain, and being introduced into the court of 
Isabella, was employed by her in some important 
embassies. He was personally present at several 
campaigns of this war. In his " Letters" he occa- 
sionally smiles at the caprice which had led him to 
exchange the pen for the sword, while his specula- 
tions on the events passing before him, being those 
of a scholar rather than of a soldier, aflbrd in their 
moral complexion a pleasing contrast to the dreary 
details of blood and battle. Another authority is 
the Chronicle of Bernaldez, a worthy ecclesiastic of 



IRVINg's conquest of GRANADA. 121 

that period, whose bulky manuscript, like that of 
many a better writer, lies still ingulfed in the dust 
of some Spanish library, having never been admit- 
ted to the honours of the press. Copies of it, how- 
ever, are freely circulated. It is one of those good- 
natured, gossiping memorials of an antique age, 
abounding equally in curious and commoriplace in- 
cident, told in a way sufficiently proHx, but not 
without considerable interest. The testimony of 
this writer is of particular value, moreover, on this 
occasion, from the proximity of his residence in An- 
dalusia to those scenes which were the seat of the 
war. His style overflows with that religious loyalty 
with which Mr. Irving has liberally seasoned the 
effusions of Fra Antonio Agapida. Hernando del 
Pulgar, another contemporary historian, was the 
secretary and counsellor of their Catholic majesties, 
and appointed by them to the post of national chron- 
icler, an office famihar both to the courts of Castile 
and Aragon, in which latter country, especially, it 
has been occupied by some of its most distinguished 
historians. Pulgar's long residence at court, his 
practical acquaintance with affairs, and, above all, 
the access which he obtained, by means of his offi- 
cial station, to the best sources of information, have 
enabled him to make his work a rich repository of 
facts relating to the general resources of government, 
the policy of its administration, and, more particu- 
larly, the conduct of the military operations in the 
closing war of Granada, of which he was himself an 
eyewitness. In addition to these writers, this period 

a 



122 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

lias been illumined by the labours of the most cele- 
brated historians of Castile and Aragon, Mariana 
and Zurita, both of whom conclude their narratives 
with it, the last expanding the biography of Ferdi- 
nand alone into two volumes folio. Besides these, 
Mr. Irving has derived collateral lights from many 
sources of inferior celebrity, but not less unsuspicious 
credit. So that, in conclusion, notwithstanding a 
certain dramatic colouring which Fra Agapida's 
" Chronicle" occasionally wears, and notwithstand- 
ing the romantic forms of a style which, to borrow 
the language of Cicero, seems " to flow, as it were, 
from the very lips of the Muses," we may honestly 
recommend it as substantially an authentic record 
of one of the most interesting, and, as far as English 
scholars are concerned, one of the most untravelled 
portions of Spanish history. 



CERVANTES. 123 



CERVANTE S.* 

July, 1837. 

The publication, in this country, of an important 
Spanish classic in the original, with a valuable com- 
mentary, is an event of some moment in our literary 
annals, and indicates a familiarity, rapidly increas- 
ing, with the beautiful literature to which it belongs. 
It may be received as an omen favourable to the 
cause of modern literature in general, the study of 
which, in all its varieties, may be urged on substan- 
tially the same grounds. The growing importance 
attached to this branch of education is visible in 
other countries quite as much as in our own. It is 
the natural, or, rather, necessary result of the chan- 
ges which have taken place in the social relations 
of man in this revolutionary age. Formerly, a na- 
tion, pent up W^ithin its own barriers, knew less of 
its neighbours than we now know of what is going 
on in Siam or Japan. A river, a chain of mount- 
ains, an imaginary line, even, parted them as far 
asunder as if oceans had rolled between. To speak 
correctly, it was their imperfect civilization, their 

* " El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, compuesto por Mi- 
guel T)E Cervantes Saavedba. Nueva Edicion Clasica, illustrada con 
Notas Historicas, Grammaticales y Criticas, por la Academia Espanola, 
sus Individuos de Numero Pellicer, Arrieta, y Clemencin. Emmendada 
y corregida por Francisco Sales, A.M., Instructor de Frances y Espanol 
en la Universidad de Harvard, en Cambrigia, Estado de Massachusetts, 
Norte America," 2 vols. 12mo, Boston, 1836. 



124 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ignorance of the means and the subjects of commu- 
nication, which thus kept them asunder. Now, on 
the contrary, a change in the domestic institutions 
of one country can hardly be effected without a 
corresponding agitation in those of its neighbours. 
A treaty of aUiance can scarcely be adjusted with- 
out the intervention of a general Congress. The 
sword cannot be unsheathed in one part of Chris- 
tendom without thousands leaping from their scab- 
bards in every other. The whole system is bound 
together by as nice sympathies as if animated by a 
common pulse, and the remotest countries of Eu- 
rope are brought into contiguity as intimate as wer-e 
in ancient times the provinces of a single monarchy. 
This intimate association has been prodigiously 
increased of late years by the unprecedented dis- 
coveries which science has made for facilitating in- 
tercommunication. The inhabitant of Great Brit- 
ain, that " ultima Thule" of the ancients, can now 
run down to the extremity of Italy in less time than 
it took Horace to go from Rome to Brundusium. 
A steamboat of fashionable tourists will touch at all 
the places of note in the Iliad and Odyssey in fewer 
weeks than it would have cost years to an ancient 
Argonaut, or a crusader of the Middle Ages. Ev- 
ery one, of course, travels, and almost every capital 
and noted watering-place on the Continent swarms 
with its thousands, and Paris with its tens of thou- 
sands of itinerant Cockneys, many of whom, per- 
haps, have not wandered beyond the sound of Bow 
bells in their own little island. 



CERVANTES. 125 

Few of these adventurers are so dull as not to be 
quickened into something like curiosity respecting 
the language and institutions of the strange people 
among whom they are thrown, while the better 
sort and more intelligent are led to study more 
carefully the new forms, whether in arts or letters 
under which human genius is unveiled to them. 

The effect of all this is especially visible in the 
reforms introduced into the modern systems of edu- 
cation. In both the universities recently estabhshed 
in London, the apparatus for instruction, instead of 
being limited to the ancient tongues, is extended to 
the whole circle of modern literature ; and the edi- 
torial labours of many of the professors show that 
they do not sleep on their posts. Periodicals, un- 
der the management of the ablest writers, furnish 
valuable contributions of foreign criticism and intel- 
ligence ; and regular histories of the various Conti- 
nental literatures, a department in which the Eng- 
lish are singularly barren, are understood to be now 
in actual preparation. 

But, although barren of literary, the English have 
made important contributions to the political his- 
tory of the Continental nations. That of Spain has 
employed some of their best writers, who, it must 
be admitted, however, have confined themselves so 
far to the foreign relations of the country as to 
have left the domestic in comparative obscurity. 
Thus Robertson's great work is quite as much the 
history of Europe as of Spain under Charles the 
Fifth ; and Watson's " Reign of Philip the Second" 



126 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

might with equal propriety be styled " The War of 
the Netherlands," which is its principal burden. 

A few works recently pubhshed in the United 
States have shed far more light on the interior or- 
ganization and intellectual culture of the Spanish 
nation. Such, for example, are the writings of Ir- 
ving, whose gorgeous colouring reflects so clearly 
the chivalrous splendours of the fifteenth century, 
and the travels of Lieutenant Slidell, presenting 
sketches equally animated of the social aspect of 
that most picturesque of all lands in the present cen- 
tury. In Mr. Gushing's "Reminiscences of Spain" 
we find, mingled with much characteristic fiction, 
some very laborious inquiries into curious and recon- 
dite points of history. In the purely literary depart- 
ment, Mr. Ticknor's beautifi.il lectures before the 
classes of Harvard University, still in manuscript, 
embrace a far more extensive range of criticism than 
is to be found in any Spanish work, and display, at 
the same time, a degree of thoroughness and re- 
search w^hich the comparative paucity of materials 
will compel us to look for in vain in Bouterwek or 
Sismondi. Mr. Ticknor's successor. Professor Long- 
fellow, favourably known by other compositions, has 
enriched our language with a noble version of the 
" Coplas de Manrique," the finest gem, beyond all 
comparison, in the Castihan verse of the fifteenth 
century. We have also read with pleasure a clever 
translation of Cluevedo's " Visions," no very easy 
achievement, by Mr. Elliot, of Philadelphia, though 
the translator is wrong in supposing his the first Eng- 



CERVANTES. 127 

lish version. The first is as old as Queen Anne's 
time, and was made bj the famous Sir Roger 
L'Estrange. To close the account, Mr. Sales, the 
venerable instructer in Harvard College, has now 
given, for the first time in the New World, an elab- 
orate edition of the prince of Castihan classics, in a 
form which may claim, to a certain extent, the merit 
of originality. 

We shall postpone the few remarks we have to 
make on this edition to the close of our article ; and, 
in the mean time, we propose, not to give the fife of 
Cervantes, but to notice such points as are least fa- 
miliar in his literary history, and especially in regard 
to the composition and publication of his great work, 
the Don Quixote ; a work which, from its wide and 
long-estabHshed popularity, may be said to consti- 
tute part of the literature, not merely of Spain, but 
of every country in Europe. 

The age of Cervantes was that of Philip the Sec- 
ond, when the Spanish monarchy, declining some- 
what from its palmy state, was still making extraor- 
dinary efforts to maintain, and even to extend its al- 
ready overgrown empire. Its navies w^ere on every 
sea, and its armies in every quarter of the Old World 
and in the New. Arms was the only profession 
worthy of a gentleman ; and there was scarcely a 
writer of any eminence — certainly no bard — of the 
age, who, if he were not in orders, had not borne 
arms, at some period, in the service of his country. 
Cervantes, wdio, though poor, was born of an an- 
cient family (it must go hard with a Castilian who 



128 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

cannot make out a pedigree for himself), had a full 
measure of this chivah'ous spirit, and, during the first 
half of his life, we find him in the midst of all the 
stormy and disastrous scenes of the iron trade of 
war. His love of the military profession, even after 
the loss of his hand, or of the use of it, for it is un- 
certain which, is sufficient proof of his adventurous 
spirit. In the course of his checkered career he 
visited the principal countries in the Mediterranean, 
and passed five years in melancholy captivity at Al- 
giers. The time was not lost, however, which fur- 
nished his keen eye with those glowing pictures of 
Moslem luxury and magnificence with which he has 
enriched his pages. After a life of unprecedented 
hardship, he returned to his own country, covered 
with laurels and scars, with very little money in his 
pocket, but with plenty of that experience which, 
regarding him as a novelist, might be considered his 
stock in trade. 

The poet may draw from the depths of his own 
fancy ; the scholar from his library ; but the proper 
study of the dramatic writer, whether in verse or in 
prose, is man — man, as he exists in society. He 
who would faithfully depict human character can- 
not study it too nearly and variously. He must sit 
down, like Scott, by the fireside of the peasant, and 
listen to the " auld wife's" tale ; he must preside, 
with Fielding, at a petty justice Sessions, or share 
with some Squire Western in the glorious hazards 
of a foxhunt; he must, fike Smollett and Cooper, 
study the mysteries of the deep, and mingle on the 



CERVANTES. 129 

Stormy element itself with the singular beings whose 
destinies he is to describe ; or, like Cervantes, he 
must wander among other races and in other climes 
before his pencil can give those chameleon touches 
which reflect the shifting, many-coloured hues of 
actual life. He may, indeed, like Rousseau, if it 
were possible to imagine another Rousseau, turn 
his thoughts inward, and draw from the depths of 
his own soul ; but he would see there only his own 
individual passions and prejudices, and the portraits 
he might sketch, however various in subordinate de- 
tails, would be, in their characteristic features, only 
the reproduction of himself. He might, in short, be 
a poet, a philosopher, but not a painter of life and 
manners. 

Cervantes had ample means for pursuing the 
study of human character, after his return to Spain, 
in the active life which engaged him in various parts 
of the country. In Andalusia he might have found 
the models of the sprightly wit and delicate irony 
with which he has seasoned his fictions ; in Se- 
ville, in particular, he was brought in contact with 
the fry of small sharpers and pickpockets, who make 
so respectable a figure in his picaresco novels ; and 
in La Mancha he not only found the geography of 
his Don Cluixote, but that whimsical contrast of 
pride and poverty in the natives, which has furnish- 
ed the outUnes of many a broad caricature to the 
comic writers of Spain. 

During all this while he had made himself known 
only by his pastoral fiction, the " Galatea," a beau- 

R 



130 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tiful specimen of an insipid class, which, with all 
its literary merits, afforded no scope for the power 
of depicting human character, which he possessed, 
perhaps, unknown to himself He wrote, also, a 
good number of plays, all of which, except two, and 
these recovered only at the close of the last centu- 
ry, have perished. One of these, " The Siege of 
Numantia," displays that truth of drawing and 
strength of colour which mark the consummate 
artist. It was not until he had reached his fifty- 
seventh year that he completed the First Part of his 
great work, the Don Quixote. The most celebrated 
novels, unlike most works of imagination, seem to 
have been the production of the later period of life. 
Fielding was between forty and fifty when he wrote 
" Tom Jones." Richardson was sixty, or very near 
it, when he wrote " Clarissa ;" and Scott was some 
years over forty when he began the series of the 
Waverley novels. The world, the school of the 
novelist, cannot be run through like the terms of a 
university, and the knowledge of its manifold vari- 
eties must be the result of long and diligent training. 
The First Part of the duixote was begun, as the 
author tells us, in a prison, to which he had been 
brought, not by crime or debt, but by some offence, 
probably, to the worthy people of La Mancha. It 
is not the only work of genius which has struggled 
into being in such unfavourable quarters. The "Pil- 
grim's Progress," the most popular, probably, of Eng- 
lish fictions, was composed under similar circum- 
stances. But we doubt if such brilliant fancies and 



CERVANTES. 131 

such flashes of humour ever hghted up the walls of 
the prison-house before the time of Cervantes. 

The First Part of the Don Q,uixote was given to 
the public in 1605. Cervantes, when the time ar- 
rived for launching his satire against the old, deep- 
rooted prejudices of his countrymen, probably re- 
garded it, as well he might, as little less rash than 
his own hero's tilt against the windmills. He sought, 
accordingly, to shield himself under the cover of a 
powerful name, and asked leave to dedicate the book 
to a Castilian grandee, the Duke de Bejar. The 
duke, it is said, whether ignorant of the design, or 
doubting the success of the work, would have de- 
clined, but Cervantes urged him first to peruse a 
single chapter. The audience summoned to sit in 
judgment were so dehghted with the first pages, 
that they would not abandon the novel till they had 
heard the whole of it. The duke, of course, with- 
out farther hesitation, condescended to allow his 
name to be inserted in this passport to immortality. 

There is nothing very improbable in the story. 
It reminds one of a similar experiment by St. Pierre, 
who submitted his manuscript of " Paul and Vir- 
ginia" to a circle of French litterateurs, Monsieur 
and Madame Necker, the Abbe Galiani, Thomas, 
BufFon, and some others, all wits of the first water 
in the metropolis. Hear the result, in the words of 
his biographer, or, rather, his agreeable translator : 
" At first the author was heard in silence ; by de- 
grees the attention grew languid; they began to 
whisper, to gape, and hstened no longer. M. de 



132 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

BufFon looked at his watch, and called for his 
horses ; those near the door slipped out ; Thomas 
went to sleep ; M. Necker laughed to see the ladies 
weep; and the ladies, ashamed of their tears, did 
not dare to confess that they had been interested. 
The reading being finished, nothing was praised. 
Madame Necker alone criticised the conversation 
of Paul and the old man. This moral appeared to 
her tedious and commonplace ; it broke the action, 
chilled the reader, and was a sort of glass of iced 
imter. M. de St. Pierre retired in a state of inde- 
scribable depression. He regarded what had passed 
as his sentence of death. The effect of his work 
on an audience like that to which he had read it 
left him no hope for the future." Yet this work 
was " Paul and Virginia," one of the most popular 
books in the French language. So much for criti- 
cism! 

The truth seems to be, that the judgment of no 
private circle, however well qualified by taste and 
talent, can afford a sure prognostic of that of the 
great public. If the manuscript to be criticised is 
our friend's, of course the verdict is made up before 
perusal. If some great man modestly sues for our 
approbation, our self-complacency has been too 
much flattered for us to withhold it. If it be a little 
man (and St. Pierre was but a little man at that 
time), our prejudices — the prejudices of poor human 
nature — will be very apt to take an opposite direc- 
tion. Be the cause what it may, whoever rests his 
hopes of public favour on the smiles of a coterie 



CERVANTES. 133 

runs the risk of finding himself very unpleasantly 
deceived. Many a trim bark which has flaunted 
gayly in a summer lake has gone to pieces amid the 
billows and breakers of the rude ocean. 

The prognostic, in the case of Cervantes, how- 
ever, proved more correct. His work produced an 
instantaneous effect on the community. He had 
struck a note which found an echo in every bosom. 
Four editions were pubhshed in the course of the 
first year ; two in Madrid, one in Valencia, and an- 
other at Lisbon. 

This success, almost unexampled in any age, was 
still more extraordinary in one in which the read- 
ing pubhc was comparatively limited. That the 
book found its way speedily into the very highest 
circles in the kingdom is evident from the well- 
known explanation of Philip the Third, when he 
saw a student laughing immoderately over some vol- 
ume : " The man must be either out of his wits, or 
reading Don Cluixote." Notwithstanding this, its au- 
thor felt none of that sunshine of royal favour which 
would have been so grateful in his necessities. 

The period was that of the golden prime of Cas- 
tilian literature. But the monarch on the throne, 
one of the ill-starred dynasty of Austria, would have 
been better suited to the darkest of the Middle Ages. 
His hours, divided between his devotions and his 
debaucheries, left nothing to spare for letters ; and 
his minister, the arrogant Duke of Lerma, was too 
much absorbed by his own selfish, though shallow 
schemes of policy, to trouble himself with romance 



134 BI.OGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Avriters, or their satirist. Cervantes, however, had 
entered on a career vs4iich, as he intimates in some 
of his verses, might lead to fame, but not to fortune. 
Happily, he did not compromise his fame by precip- 
itating the execution of his works from motives of 
temporary profit. It was not till several years after 
the publication of the Don Quixote that he gave to 
the world his Exemplary Novels, as he called them; 
fictions which, differing from anything before known, 
not only in the Castihan, but, in some respects, in 
any other literature, gave ample scope to his dra- 
matic talent, in the contrivance of situations, and 
the nice delineation of character. These works, 
whose diction was uncommonly rich and attractive, 
were popular from the first. 

One cannot but be led to inquire why, with such 
success as an author, he continued to be so strait- 
ened in his circumstances, as he plainly intimates 
was the case more than once in his writings. From 
the Don Gluixote, notwithstanding its great run, he 
probably received little, since he had parted with 
the entire copyright before publication, when the 
work was regarded as an experiment, the result of 
which was quite doubtful. It is not so easy to ex- 
plain the difficulty, when his success as an author 
had been so completely established. Cervantes in- 
timates his dissatisfaction, in more than one place 
in his writings, with the booksellers themselves. 
" What, sir !" replies an author introduced into his 
Don Quixote, " would you have me sell the profit 
of my labour to a bookseller for three maravedis a 



CERVANTES. 135 

sheet? for that is the most they will bid, nay, and 
expect, too, I should thank them for the offer." This 
burden of lamentation, the alleged illiberahty of the 
publisher towards the poor author, is as old as the 
art of book-making itself But the public receive 
the account fi*om the party aggrieved only. If the 
bookseller reported his own case, we should, no 
doubt, have a different version. If Cervantes was 
in the right, the trade in Castile showed a degree of 
dexterity in their proceedings which richly entitled 
them to the pillory. In one of his tales, we find a 
certain licentiate complaining of " the tricks and 
deceptions they put upon an author when they buy 
a copyright from him ; and still more, the manner 
in which they cheat him if he prints the book at 
his own charges ; since nothing is more common 
than for them to agree for fifteen hundred, and have 
privily, perhaps, as many as three thousand thrown 
off, one half, at the least, of which they sell, not for 
his profit, but their own. 

The writings of Cervantes appear to have gain- 
ed him, however, two substantial friends in Cabra, 
the Count of Lemos, and the Archbishop of Toledo, 
of the ancient family of Rojas ; and the patronage of 
these illustrious individuals has been nobly recom- 
pensed by having their names forever associated with 
the imperishable productions of genius. 

There was still one kind of patronage wanting 
in this early age, that of a great, enlightened com- 
munity — the only patronage which can be received 
without some sense of degradation by a generous 



136 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

mind. There was, indeed, one golden channel of 
pubHc favour, and that was the theatre. The drama 
has usually flourished most at the period when a na- 
tion is beginning to taste the sweets of literary cul- 
ture. Such was the early part of the seventeenth 
century in Europe ; the age of Shakspeare, Jonson, 
and Fletcher in England ; of Ariosto, Machiavelli, 
and the wits who first successfully wooed the comic 
muse of Italy ; of the great Corneille, some years 
later, in France ; and of that miracle, or, rather, 
"monster of nature," as Cervantes styled him, Lope 
de Vega in Spain. Theatrical exhibitions are a 
combination of the material with the intellectual, at 
which the ordinary spectator derives less pleasure, 
probably, from the beautiful creations of the poet 
than from the scenic decorations, music, and other 
accessories which address themselves to the senses. 
The fondness for spectacle is characteristic of an 
early period of society, and the theatre is the most 
briUiant of pageants. With the progress of educa- 
tion and refinement, men become less open to, or, 
at least, less dependant on the pleasures of sense, and 
seek their enjoyment in more elevated and purer 
sources. Thus it is that, instead of 

" Sweating in the crowded theatre, squeezed 
And bored with elbow-points through both our sides," 

as the sad minstrel of nature sings, we sit quietly at 
home, enjoying the pleasures of fiction around our 
own firesides, and the poem or the novel takes 
the place of the acted drama. The decline of dra- 



CERVANTES. 137 

matic writing may justly be lamented as that of one 
of the most beautiful varieties in the garden of hter- 
ature. But it must be admitted to be both a symp- 
tom and a necessary consequence of the advance of 
civilization. 

The popularity of the stage, at the period of which 
we are speaking, in Spain, was greatly augmented 
by the personal influence and reputation of Lope de 
Vega, the idol of his countrymen, who threw off the 
various inventions of his genius with a rapidity and 
profusion that almost staggers credibility. It is im- 
possible to state the results of his labours in any form 
that will not powerfully strike the imagination. Thus, 
he has left 21,300,000 verses in print, besides a mass 
of manuscript. He furnished the theatre, according 
to the statement of his intimate friend, Montalvan, 
with 1800 regular plays, and 400 autos or rehgious 
dramas — all acted. He composed, according to his 
own statement, more than 100 comedies in the al- 
most incredible space of twenty-four hours each, and 
a comedy averaged between two and three thousand 
verses, great part of them rhymed and interspersed 
with sonnets and other more difficult forms of ver- 
sification. He lived seventy-two years; and suppo- 
sing him to have employed fifty of that period in 
composition, although he filled a variety of engross- 
ing vocations during that time, he must have aver- 
aged a play a week, to say nothing of twenty-one 
volumes quarto of miscellaneous works, including 
five epics, written in his leisure moments, and all 
now in print ! 

S 



138 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

The only achievements we can recall in hterary 
history bearing any resemblance to, though falling 
far short of this, are those of om* illustrious contem- 
porary. Sir Walter Scott. The complete edition of 
his works, recently advertised by Murray, with the 
addition of two volumes, of which Murray has not 
the copyright, probably contains ninety volumes 
small octavo. To these should farther be added a 
large supply of matter for the Edinburgh Annual 
Register, as well as other anonymous contributions. 
Of these, forty-eight volumes of novels and twenty- 
one of history and biography were produced be- 
tween 1814 and 1831, or in seventeen years. These 
would give an average of four volumes a year, or 
one for every three months during the whole of that 
period, to which must be added twenty-one volumes 
of poetry and prose previously published. The mere 
mechanical execution of so much work, both in his 
case and Lope de Vega's, would seem to be scarce 
possible in the limits assigned. Scott, too, was as 
variously occupied in other ways as his Spanish ri- 
val, and probably, from the social hospitality of his 
life, spent a much larger portion of his time in no 
literary occupation at all. 

Notwithstanding we have amused ourselves, at 
the expense of the reader's patience perhaps, with 
these calculations, this certainly is not the standard 
by which we should recommend to estimate works 
of genius. Wit is not to be measured, like broad- 
cloth, by the yard. Easy writing, as the adage says, 
and as we all know, is apt to be very hard reading. 



CERVANTES. 139 

This brings to our recollection a conversation, in the 
presence of Captain Basil Hall, in which some allu- 
sion having been made to the astonishing amount of 
Scott's daily composition, the literary argonaut re- 
marked, " There w^as nothing astonishing in all that, 
and that he did as much himself nearly every day 
before breakfast." Some one of the company un- 
kindly asked "v^^hether he thought the quality was 
the same." It is the quality, undoubtedly, which 
makes the difference. And in this view Lope de 
Vega's miracles lose much of their effect. Of all 
his multitudinous dramas, one or two only retain 
possession of the stage, and few, very few are now^ 
even read. His facihty of composition was like that 
of an Italian improvisatore, whose fertile fancy ea- 
sily clothes itself in verse, in a language the vowel 
terminations of which afford such a plenitude of 
rhymes. The Castihan presents even greater facil- 
ities for this than the Italian. Lope de Vega was an 
improvisatore. 

With all his neghgences and defects, how^ever, 
Lope's interesting intrigues, easy, sprightly dialogue, 
infinite variety of inventions, and the breathless ra- 
pidity with which they followed one another, so 
dazzled and bewildered the imagination, that he 
completely controlled the public, and became, in 
the words of Cervantes, "sole monarch of the stage." 
The pubUc repaid him with such substantial grati- 
tude as has never been shown, probably, to any other 
of its favourites. His fortune at one time, although 
he was careless of his expenses, amounted to one 



140^ BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

hundred thousand ducats, equal, probably, to between 
seven and eight hundred thousand dollars of the pres- 
ent day. In the same street in which dwelt this 
spoiled child of fortune, who, amid the caresses of 
the great, and the lavish smiles of the pubhc, could 
complain that his merits were negleted, lived Cer- 
vantes, struggling under adversity, or at least earning 
a painful subsistence by the labours of his immortal 
pen. What a contrast do these pictures present to 
the imagination ! If the suffrages of a coterie^ as 
we have said, afford no warrant for those of the pub- 
lic, the example before us proves that the award of 
one's contemporaries is quite as hkely to be set aside 
by posterity. Lope de Vega, who gave his name to 
his age, has now fallen into neglect even among his 
countrymen, while the fame of Cervantes, gathering 
strength with time, has become the pride of his own 
nation, as his works still continue to be the delight 
of the whole civihzed world. 

However stinted may have been the recompense 
of his deserts at home, it is gratifying to observe how 
widely his fame was diffused in his own lifetime, and 
that in foreign countries, at least, he enjoyed the full 
consideration to which he was entitled. An inter- 
esting anecdote illustrating this is recorded, which, 
as we have never seen it in Enghsh, we will lay be- 
fore the reader. On occasion of a visit made by the 
Archbishop of Toledo to the French ambassador, 
resident at Madrid, the prelate's suite fell into con- 
versation with the attendants of the minister, in the 
course of which Cervantes was mentioned. The 



CERVANTES. 141 

French gentlemen expressed their unquaUfied admi- 
ration of his writings, specifying the Galatea, Don 
Quixote, and the Novels, v^^hich, thej said, were 
read in all the countries round, and in France par- 
ticularly, where there were some who might be said 
to know them actually by heart. They intimated 
their desire to become personally acquainted with so 
eminent a man, and asked many questions respect- 
ing his present occupations, his circumstances, and 
way of life. To all this the CastiUans could only 
reply that he had {)orne arms in the service of his 
country, and was now old and poor. " What !" ex- 
claimed one of the strangers, "is Seiior Cervantes 
not in good circumstances I Why is he not main- 
tained, then, out of the public treasury ?" " Heaven 
forbid," rejoined another, " that his necessities should 
be ever relieved, if it is these which make him write, 
since it is his poverty that makes the world rich." 

There are other evidences, though not of so pleas- 
ing a character, of the eminence which he had reach- 
ed at home in the jealousy and ill will of his broth- 
er poets. The Castilian poets of that day seem to 
have possessed a full measure of that irritability 
which has been laid at the door of all their tribe 
since the days of Horace ; and the freedom of Cer- 
vantes's literary criticisms, in his Don Quixote and 
other writings, though never personal in their char- 
acter, brought down on his head a storm of arrows, 
some of which, if not sent with much force, were, 
at least, well steeped in venom. Lope de Vega is 
even said to have appeared among the assailants, 



142 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

and a sonnet, still preserved, is currently imputed to 
him, in which, after much eulogy on himself, he pre- 
dicts that the works of his rival will find their way 
into the kennel. But the author of this bad proph- 
ecy and worse poetry could never have been the 
great Lope, who showed, on all occasions, a gener- 
ous spirit, and whose literary success must have 
made such an assault unnecessary, and in the high- 
est degree unmanly. On the contrary, we have ev- 
idence of a very different feeling, in the homage 
which he renders to the merits of his illustrious con- 
temporary, in more than one passage of his acknowl- 
edged works, especially in his '* Laurel de Apolo," 
in which he concludes his poetical panegyric with 
the following touching conceit : 

" Porque se diga que una mano herida, 
Pudo dar a su dueno eterna vida." 

This poem was published by Lope in 1630, four- 
teen years after the death of his rival ; notwithstand- 
ing, Mr. Lockhart informs his readers, in his bio- 
graphical preface to the Don Quixote, that "as Lope 
de Vega was dead (1615), there was no one to di- 
vide with Cervantes the literary empire of his coun- 

try." 

In the dedication of his ill-fated comedies, 1615 
(for Cervantes, like most other celebrated novelists, 
found it difficult to concentrate his expansive vein 
within the compass of dramatic rules), the public 
was informed that " Don Quixote was already boot- 
ed," and preparing for another sally. It may seem 
strange that the author, considering the great popu- 



CERVANTES. 143 

larity of his hero, had not sent him on his adven- 
tures before. Bat he had probably regarded them 
as already terminated; and he had good reason to 
do so, since every incident in the First Part, as it 
has been styled only since the pubhcation of the 
Second, is complete in itself, and the Don, although 
not actually killed on the stage, is noticed as dead, 
and his epitaph transcribed for the reader. How- 
ever this may be, the immediate execution of his 
purpose, so long delayed, was precipitated by an 
event equally unwelcome and unexpected. This 
was the continuation of his work by another hand. 
The author's name, his nom de guerre, was Avel- 
laneda, a native of Tordesillas. Adopting the ori- 
ginal idea of Cervantes, he goes forward with the 
same characters, through similar scenes of comic 
extravagance, in the course of which he perpetrates 
sundry plagiarisms from the First I^art, and has some 
incidents so much resembling those in the Second 
Part, already written by Cervantes, that it has been 
supposed he must have had access to his manuscript. 
It is more probable, as the resemblance is but gen- 
eral, that he obtained his knowledge through hints, 
which may have fallen in conversation, from Cer- 
vantes, in the progress of his own work. The spu- 
rious continuation had some little merit, and attract- 
ed, probably, some interest, as any work conducted 
under so popular a name could not have failed to 
do. It was, however, on the whole, a vulgar per- 
formance, thickly sprinkled with such gross scurril- 
ity and indecency, as was too strong even for the 



144 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

palate of that not very fastidious age. The public 
feeling may be gathered from the fact that the author 
did not dare to depart from his incognito, and claim 
the honours of a triumph. The most dihgent in- 
quiries have established nothing farther than that he 
w^as an Aragonese, judging from his diction, and 
from the complexion of certain passages in the work 
probably an ecclesiastic, and one of the swarm of 
small dramatists, who felt themselves rudely handled 
by the criticism of Cervantes. The work was sub- 
sequently translated, or rather paraphrased, by Le 
Sage, who has more than once given a substantial 
value to gems of little price in CastiUan literature 
by the brilliancy of his setting. The original work 
of Avellaneda, always deriving an interest from the 
circumstances of its production, has been reprinted 
in the present century, and is not difficult to be met 
with. To have thus coolly invaded an author's 
own property, to have filched from him the splendid, 
though unfinished creations of his genius, before his 
own face, and while, as was publicly known, he was 
in the very process of completing them, must be ad- 
mitted to be an act of unblushing effrontery, not 
surpassed in the annals of literature. 

Cervantes was much annoyed, it appears, by the 
circumstance. The continuation of Avellaneda 
reached him, probably, when on the fifty-ninth 
chapter of the Second Part. At least, from that time 
he begins to discharge his gall on the head of the of- 
fender, who, it should be added, had consummated 
his impudence by sneering, in his introduction, at the 



CERVANTES 145 

qualifications of Cervantes. The best retort of the 
latter, however, was the publication of his own book, 
which followed at the close of 1615. 

The English novelist, Richardson, experienced a 
treatment not unlike that of the Castilian. His pop- 
ular story of Pamela was continued by another and 
very inferior hand, under the title of "Pamela in 
High Life." The circumstance prompted Richard- 
son to undertake the continuation himself; and it 
turned out, like most others, a decided failure. In- 
deed, a skilful continuation seems to be the most 
difficult work of art. The first effort of the author 
breaks, as it were, unexpectedly on the public, taking 
their judgments by surprise, and by its very success 
creating a standard by which the author himself is 
subsequently to be tried. Before, he was compared 
with others ; he is now to be compared with him- 
self. The public expectation has been raised. A 
degree of excellence, which might have found favour 
at first, will now scarcely be tolerated. It will not 
even suffice for him to maintain his own level. He 
must rise above himself. The reader, in the mean 
while, has naturally filled up the blank, and insen- 
sibly conducted the characters and the story to a 
termination in his own way. As the reality sel- 
dom keeps pace with the ideal, the author's execu- 
tion will hardly come up to the imagination of his 
readers ; at any rate, it will differ from them, and 
so far be displeasing. We experience something of 
this disappointment in the dramas borrowed from 
popular novels, where the development of the char- 

T 



146 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

acters by the dramatic author, and the new dh'ection 
given to the original story in his hands, rarely fail 
to offend the taste and preconceived ideas of the 
spectator. To feel the force of this, it is only 
necessary to see the Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, 
and other plays dramatized from the Waverley 
novels. 

Some part of the failure of such continuations is, 
no doubt, fairly chargeable, in most instances, on the 
author himself, who goes to his new task with little 
of his primitive buoyancy and vigour. He no long- 
er feels the same interest in his own labours, which, 
losing their freshness, have become as familiar to 
his imagination as a thrice-told tale. The new 
composition has, of course, a different complexion 
from the former, cold, stiff, and disjointed, like a 
bronze statue, whose parts have been separately put 
together, instead of being cast in one mould when 
the whole metal was in a state of fusion. 

The continuation of Cervantes forms a splendid 
exception to the general rule. The popularity of 
his First Part had drawn forth abundance of criti- 
cism, and he availed himself of it to correct some 
material blemishes in the design of the Second, 
while an assiduous culture of the Castilian enabled 
him to enrich his style with greater variety and 
beauty. 

He had now reached the zenith of his fame, and 
the profits of his continuation may have relieved 
the pecuniary embarrassments under which he had 
struggled. But he was not long to enjoy his 



CERVANTES. 147 

triumph. Before his death, which took place in 
the following year, he completed his romance of 
" Persiles and Sigismunda," the dedication to which, 
written a few days before his death, is strongly char- 
acteristic of its writer. It is addressed to his old 
patron, the Conde de Lemos, then absent from the 
country. After saying, in the words of the old 
Spanish proverb, that he had " one foot in the stir- 
rup" in allusion to the distant journey on which he 
was soon to set out, he adds, " Yesterday I received 
the extreme unction ; but, now that the shadows ot 
death are closing around me, I still cling to life, 
from the love of it, as well as from the desire to be- 
hold you again. But if it is decreed otherwise (and 
the will of Heaven be done), your excellency will 
at least feel assured there w^as one person whose 
wish to serve you was greater than the love of life 
itself." After these reminiscences of his benefactor, 
he expresses his own purpose, should life be spared, 
to complete several w^orks he had already begun. 
Such were the last words of this illustrious man ; 
breathing the same generous sensibility, the same 
ardent love of letters, and beautiful serenity of tem- 
per which distinguished him through life. He died 
a few days after, on the 23d of April, 1616. His 
remains were laid, without funeral pomp, in the mon- 
astery of the Holy Trinity at Madrid. No memo- 
rial points out the spot to the eye of the traveller, 
nor is it known at this day. And, while many a 
costly construction has been piled on the ashes of 
the little greats to the shame of Spain be it spoken. 



148 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

no monument has yet been erected in honour of 
the greatest genius she has produced. He has buik, 
however, a monument for himself more durable than 
brass or sculptured marble. 

Don Quixote is too famihar to the reader to re- 
quire any analysis ; but we will enlarge on a few 
circumstances attending its composition but little 
known to the English scholar, which may enable 
him to form a better judgment for himself The 
age of chivalry, as depicted in romances, could nev- 
er, of course, have had any real existence ; but the 
sentiments w^hich are described as animating that 
age have been found more or less operative in differ- 
ent countries and different periods of society. In 
Spain, especially, this influence is to be discerned 
from a very eai*ly date. Its inhabitants may be said 
to have lived in a romantic atmosphere, in which 
all the extravagances of chivalry were nourished by 
their peculiar situation. Their hostile relations with 
the Moslem kept alive the full glow of religious and 
patriotic feeling. Their history is one interminable 
crusade. An enemy always on the borders, invited 
perpetual displays of personal daring and adventure. 
The refinement and magnificence of the Spanish 
Arabs throw a lustre over these contests, such as 
could not be reflected from the rude skirmishes with 
their Christian neighbours. Lofty sentiments, em- 
bellished by the softer refinements of courtesy, were 
blended in the martial bosom of the Spaniard, and 
Spain became emphatically the land of romantic 
chivalry. 



CERVANTES. 149 

The very laws themselves, conceived in this spirit, 
contributed greatly to foster it. The ancient code 
of Alfonso the Tenth, in the thirteenth century, 
after many minute regulations for the deportment of 
the good knight, enjoins on him to "invoke the name 
of his mistress in the fight, that it may infuse new- 
ardour into his soul, and preserve him from the com- 
mission of unknightly actions." Such laws were 
not a dead letter. The history of Spain shows that 
the sentiment of romantic gallantry penetrated the 
nation more deeply, and continued longer than in 
any other quarter of Christendom. 

Foreign chroniclers, as well as domestic, of the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, notice the frequent 
appearance of Spanish knights in different courts of 
Europe, whither they had travelled, in the language 
of an old writer, " to seek honour and reverence" by 
their feats of arms. In the Paston Letters, written 
in the time of Henry the Sixth of England, we find 
a notice of a Castilian knight who presented him- 
self before the court, and, with his mistress's favour 
around his arm, challenged the English cavaliers 
" to run a course of sharp spears with him for his 
sovereign lady's sake." Pulgar, a Spanish chron- 
icler of the close of the sixteenth century, speaks of 
this roving knight-errantry as a thing of familiar oc- 
currence among the young cavahers of his day ; and 
Oviedo, who lived somewhat later, notices the ne- 
cessity under which every true knight found himself, 
of being in love, or feigning to he so, in order to 
give a suitable lustre and incentive to his achieve- 



150 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ments. But the most singular proof of the extrava- 
gant pitch to which these romantic feehngs were 
carried in Spain occurs in the account of the jousts 
appended to the fine old chronicle of Alvaro de 
Luna, published by the Academy in 1784. The 
principal champion was named Suefio de Cluenones, 
who, with nine companions in arms, defended a pass 
at Orbigo, not far from the shrine of Compostella, 
against all comers, in the presence of King John the 
Second and his court. The object of this passage 
of arms, as it was called, was to release the knight 
from the obligation imposed on him by his mistress, 
of publicly wearing an iron collar round his neck 
every Thursday. The jousts continued for thirty 
days, and the doughty champions fought without 
shield or target, with weapons bearing points of 
Milan steel. Six hundred and twenty-seven en- 
counters took place, and one hundred and sixty-six 
lances were broken, when the emprise was declared 
to be fairly achieved. The whole affair is narrated, 
with becoming gravity, by an eyewitness, and the 
reader may fancy himself perusing the adventures of 
a Launcelot or an Amadis. The particulars of this 
tourney are detailed at length in Mills's Chivalry 
(vol. ii., chap, v.), where, however, the author has 
defrauded the successful champions of their full hon- 
ours by incorrectly reporting the number of lances 
broken as only sixty-six. 

The taste for these romantic extravagances natu- 
rally fostered a corresponding taste for the perusal 
of tales of chivalry. Indeed, they acted reciprocally 



CERVANTES. 151 

on each other. These chimerical legends had once, 
also, beguiled the long evenings of our Norman an- 
cestors ; but, in the progress of civihzation, had 
gradually given way to other and more natural forms 
of composition. They still maintained their ground 
in Italy, whither they had passed later, and where 
they were consecrated by the hand of genius. But 
Italy was not the true soil of chivalry, and the inim- 
itable fictions of Bojardo, Pulci, and Ariosto were 
composed with that lurking smile of half-suppressed 
mirth which, far from a serious tone, could raise 
only a corresponding smile of incredulity in the 
reader. 

In Spain, however, the marvels of romance were 
all taken in perfect good faith. Not that they were 
received as literally true ; but the reader surrendered 
himself up to the illusion, and was moved to admi- 
ration by the recital of deeds which, viewed in any 
other light than as a wild frolic of imagination, would 
be supremely ridiculous ; for these tales had not the 
merit of a seductive style and melodious versifica- 
tion to relieve them. They were, for the most part, 
an ill-digested mass of incongruities, in which there 
was as little keeping and probability in the charac- 
ters as in the incidents, while the whole w^as told in 
that stiked " Hercles' vein," and with that hcen- 
tiousness of allusion and imagery which could not 
fail to debauch both the taste and the morals of the 
youthful reader. The mind, famiharized with these 
monstrous, over-coloured pictures, lost all relish for 
the chaste and sober productions of art. The love 



152 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of the gigantic and the marvellous indisposed the 
reader for the simple delineations of truth in real 
history. The feelings expressed by a sensible Span- 
iard of the sixteenth century, the anonymous author 
of the " Dialogo de las Lenguas," probably represent 
those of many of his contemporaries. " Ten of the 
best years of my life," says he, " were spent no more 
profitably than in devouring these lies, which I did 
even while eating my meals ; and the consequence 
of this depraved appetite was, that if I took in hand 
any true book of history, or one that passed for such, 
I was unable to wade through it." 

The influence of this meretricious taste was near- 
ly as fatal on the historian himself as on his readers, 
since he felt compelled to minister to the pubhc ap- 
petite such a mixture of the marvellous in all his 
narrations as materially discredited the veracity of 
his writings. Every hero became a demigod, who 
put the labours of Hercules to shame ; and every 
monk or old hermit was converted into a saint, who 
wrought more miracles, before and after death, than 
would have sufficed to canonize a monastery. The 
fabulous ages of Greece are scarcely more fabulous 
than the close of the Middle Ages in Spanish his- 
tory, which compares very discreditably, in this par- 
ticular, with similar periods in most European coun- 
tries. The confusion of fact and fiction continues 
to a very late age ; and as one gropes his way 
through the twilight of tradition, he is at a loss 
whether the dim objects are men or shadows. The 
most splendid names in Castilian annals — names in- 



CERVANTES. 153 

corporated with the glorious achievements of the 
land, and embalmed alike in the page of the chron- 
icler and the song of the minstrel — names associated 
with the most stirring, patriotic recollections — are 
now found to have been the mere coinage of fancy. 
There seems to be no more reason for beheving in 
the real existence of Bernardo del Carpio, of whom 
so much has been said and sung, than in that of 
Charlemagne's paladins, or of the Knights of the 
Round Table. Even the Cid, the national hero of 
Spain, is contended, by some of the shrewdest na- 
tive critics of our own times, to be an imaginary be- 
ing ; and it is certain that the splendid fabric of his 
exploits, familiar as household words to every Span- 
iard, has crumbled to pieces under the rude touch 
of modern criticism. These heroes, it is true, flour- 
ished before the introduction of romances of chiv- 
alry ; but the legends of their prowess have been 
multiplied beyond bounds, in consequence of the 
taste created by these romances, and an easy faith 
accorded to them at the same time, such as would 
never have been conceded in any other civilized 
nation. In short, the elements of truth and false- 
hood became so blended, that history was converted 
into romance, and romance received the credit due 
only to history. 

These mischievous consequences drew down the 
animadversions of thinking men, and at length pro- 
voked the interference of government itself In 
1543, Charles the Fifth, by an edict, prohibited books 
of chivalry from being imported into his Ameri- 

U 



154 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

can colonies, or being printed, or even read there 
The legislation for America proceeded from the 
crown alone, which had always regarded the New 
World as its own exclusive property. In 1555, 
however, the Cortes of the kingdom presented a 
petition (which requires only the royal signature to 
become at once the law), setting forth the manifold 
evils resulting from these romances. There is an 
air at once both of simphcity and solemnity in the 
language of this instrument which may amuse the 
reader : " Moreover, we say that it is very notorious 
what mischief has been done to young men and 
maidens, and other persons, by the perusal of books 
full of lies and vanities, like Amadis, and works of 
that description, since young people especially, from 
their natural idleness, resort to this kind of reading, 
and, becoming enamoured of passages of love or 
arms, or other nonsense which they find set forth 
therein, when situations at all analogous offer, are 
led to act much more extravagantly than they other- 
wise would have done. And many times the daugh- 
ter, when her mother has locked her up safely at 
home, amuses herself with reading these books, which 
do her more hurt than she would have received from 
going abroad. All which redounds, not only to the 
dishonour of individuals, but to the great detriment 
of conscience, by diverting the affections from holy, 
true, and Christian doctrine, to those wicked vani- 
ties with which the wits, as we have intimated, are 
completely bewildered. To remedy this, we entreat 
your majesty that no book treating of such matters 



CERVANTES. 155 

be henceforth permitted to be read, that those now 
printed be collected and burned, and that none be 
pubhshed hereafter without special license; by which 
measures your majesty will render great service to 
God as well as to these kingdoms," &c., &c. 

Notwithstanding this emphatic expression of pub- 
he disapprobation, these enticing works maintained 
their popularity. The Emperor Charles, unmindful 
of his own interdict, took great satisfaction in their 
perusal. The xoydX fetes frequently commemorated 
the fabulous exploits of chivalry, and Philip the Sec- 
ond, then a young man, appeared in these spectacles 
in the character of an adventurous knight-errant. 
Moratin enumerates more than seventy bulky ro- 
mances, all produced in the sixteenth century, some 
of which passed through several editions, while 
many more works of the kind have, doubtless, es- 
caped his researches. The last on his catalogue 
was printed in 1602, and was composed by one of 
the nobles at the court. Such was the state of 
things when Cervantes gave to the world the First 
Part of his Don Quixote ; and it was against prej- 
udices which had so long bade defiance to public 
opinion and the law itself that he now aimed the 
delicate shafts of his irony. It was a perilous em- 
prise. 

To effect his end, he did not produce a mere hu- 
morous travesty, like several of the Itahan poets, 
who, having selected some well-known character in 
romance, make him fall into such low dialogue and 
such gross buffoonery as contrast most ridiculously 



156 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

with his assumed name ; for this, though a very good 
jest in its way, was but a jest, and Cervantes want- 
ed the biting edge of satire. He was, besides, too 
much of a poet — was too deeply penetrated with 
the true spirit of chivahy not to respect the noble 
qualities which were the basis of it. He shows this 
in the auto dafe of the Don's library, where he spares 
the Amadis de Gaula and some others, the best of 
their kind. He had once himself, as he tells us, ac- 
tually commenced a serious tale of chivalry. 

Cervantes brought forward a personage, therefore, 
in whom were imbodied all those generous virtues 
which belong to chivalry : disinterestedness, con- 
tempt of danger, unblemished honour, knightly cour- 
tesy, and those aspirations after ideal excellence 
which, if empty dreams, are the dreams of a mag- 
nanimous spirit. They are, indeed, represented by 
Cervantes as too ethereal for this world, and are 
successively dispelled as they come in contact with 
the coarse realities of life. It is this view of the 
subject which has led Sismondi, among other crit- 
ics, to consider that the principal end of the author 
was "the ridicule of enthusiasm — the contrast of the 
heroic with the vulgar," and he sees something pro- 
foundly sad in the conclusions to which it leads. 
This sort of criticism appears to be over-refined. It 
resembles the efforts of some commentators to alle- 
gorize the great epics of Homer and Virgil, throw- 
ing a disagreeable mistiness over the story by con- 
verting mere shadows into substances, and substan- 
ces into shadows. 



CERVANTES. 157 

The great purpose of Cervantes was, doubtless, 
that expressly avowed by himself, namely, to correct 
the popular taste for romances of chivalry. It is 
unnecessary to look for any other in so plain a tale, 
although, it is true, the conduct of the story produ- 
ces impressions on the reader, to a certain extent, 
like those suggested by Sismondi. The melancholy 
tendency, however, is, in a great degree, counteract- 
ed by the exquisitely ludicrous character of the in- 
cidents. Perhaps, after all, if we are to hunt for a 
moral as the key of the fiction, w^e may, with more 
reason, pronounce it to be the necessity of propor- 
tioning our undertakings to our capacities. 

The mind of the hero, Don Quixote, is an ideal 
world, into which Cervantes has poured all the rich 
stores of his own imagination, the poet's golden 
dreams, high romantic exploit, and the sweet vis- 
ions of pastoral happiness; the gorgeous chimeras 
of the fancied age of chivalry, which had so long 
entranced the world; splendid illusions, which, float- 
ing before us like the airy bubbles which the child 
throws off from his pipe, reflect, in a thousand va- 
riegated tints, the rude objects around, until, brought 
into collision with these, they are dashed in pieces, 
and melt into air. These splendid images derive 
tenfold beauty from the rich, antique colouring of 
the author's language, skilfully imitated from the old 
romances, but which necessarily escapes in the trans- 
lation into a foreign tongue. Don Quixote's insan- 
ity operates both in mistaking the ideal for the real, 
and the real for the ideal. Whatever he has found 



158 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

in romances, he believes to exist in the world ; and 
he converts all he meets with in the world into the 
visions of his romances. It is difficult to say which 
of the two produces the most ludicrous results. 

For the better exposure of these mad fancies, 
Cervantes has not only put them into action in real 
life, but contrasted them with another character 
which may be said to form the reverse side of his 
hero's. Honest Sancho represents the material 
principle as perfectly as his master does the intel- 
lectual or ideal. He is of the earth, earthy. Sly, 
selfish, sensual, his dreams are not of glory, but of 
good feeding. His only concern is for his carcass. 
His notions of honour appear to be much the same 
with those of his jovial contemporary, Falstaff, as 
conveyed in his memorable soliloquy. In the sub- 
lime night-piece which ends with the fulling-mills — 
truly sublime until we reach the denouement — San- 
cho asks his master, " Why need you go about this 
adventure ? It is main dark, and there is never a 
living soul sees us ; we have nothing to do but to 
sheer off and get out of harm's way. Who is there 
to take notice of our flinching ?" Can anything be 
imagined more exquisitely opposed to the true spirit 
of chivalry ? The whole compass of fiction no- 
where displays the power of contrast so forcibly as 
in these two characters : perfectly opposed to each 
other, not only in their minds and general habits, 
but in the minutest details of personal appearance. 

It was a great effort of art for Cervantes to main- 
tain the dignity of his hero's character in the midst 



CERVANTES. 159 

of the whimsical and ridiculous distresses in which 
he has perpetually involved him. His infirmity 
leads us to distinguish between his character and 
his conduct, and to absolve him from all responsi- 
bihty for the latter. The author's art is no less 
shown in regard to the other principal figure in the 
piece, Sancho Panza, who, with the most contempt- 
ible quahties, contrives to keep a strong hold on our 
interest by the kindness of his nature and his shrewd 
understanding. He is far too shrewd a person, in- 
deed, to make it natural for him to have followed so 
crack-brained a master unless bribed by the promise 
of a substantial recompense. He is a personifica- 
tion, as it were, of the popular wisdom — a " bundle 
of proverbs," as liis master somewhere styles him ; 
and proverbs are the most compact form in which 
the wisdom of a people is digested. They have 
been collected into several distinct works in Spain, 
where they exceed in number those of any other, 
if not every other, country in Europe. As many of 
them are of great antiquity, they are of inestimable 
price with the Castilian purists, as affording rich 
samples of obsolete idioms and the various muta- 
tions of the language. 

The subordinate portraits in the romance, though 
not wrought with the same care, are admirable stud- 
ies of national character. In this view, the Don 
Quixote may be said to form an epoch in the his- 
tory of letters, as the original of that kind of compo- 
sition, the Novel of Character, which is one of the 
distinguishing pecuHarities of modern literature. 



160 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

When well executed, this sort of writing rises to 
the dignity of history itself, and may be said to per- 
form no insignificant part of the functions of the 
latter. History describes men less as they are than 
as they appear, as they are playing a part on the 
great political theatre — men in masquerade. It 
rests on state documents, which too often cloak real 
purposes under an artful veil of policy, or on the ac- 
counts of contemporaries blinded by passion or in- 
terest. Even without these deductions, the revolu- 
tions of states, their wars, and their intrigues do not 
present the only aspect, nor, perhaps, the most in- 
teresting under which human nature can be studied. 
It is man in his domestic relations, around his own 
fireside, where alone his real character can be truly 
disclosed: in his ordinary occupations in society, 
whether for purposes of profit or of pleasure ; in his 
every-day manner of living, his tastes and opinions, 
as drawn out in social intercourse ; it is, in short, 
under all those forms which make up the interior of 
society that man is to be studied, if we would get 
the true form and pressure of the age — if, in short, 
w^e would obtain clear and correct ideas of the ac- 
tual progress of civilization. 

But these topics do not fall within the scope of 
the historian. He cannot find authentic materials 
for them. They belong to the novelist, who, in- 
deed, contrives his incidents and creates his charac- 
ters, but who, if true to his art, animates them with 
the same tastes, sentiments, and motives of action 
which belong to the period of his fiction. His por- 



CERVANTES. 161 

trait is not the less true because no individual has 
sat for it. He has seized the physiognomy of the 
times. Who is there that does not derive a more 
distinct idea of the state of society and manners in 
Scotland from the Waverley novels than from the 
best of its historians ? of the condition of the Mid- 
dle Ages, from the single romance of Ivanhoe, than 
from the volumes of Hume or Hallam 1 In like 
manner, the pencil of Cervantes has given a far 
more distinct and a richer portraiture of life in 
Spain in the sixteenth century than can be gather- 
ed from a library of monkish chronicles. 

Spain, which furnished the first good model of 
this kind of writing, seems to have possessed more 
ample materials for it than any other country ex- 
cept England. This is perhaps owing, in a great 
degree, to the freedom and originahty of the popular 
character. It is the country where the lower class- 
es make the nearest approach, in their conversation, 
to what is called humour. Many of the national 
proverbs are seasoned with it, as well as the picares- 
CO tales, the indigenous growth of the soil, where, 
however, the humour runs rather too much to mere 
practical jokes. The free expansion of the popular 
characteristics may be traced, in part, to the free- 
dom of the political institutions of the country be- 
fore the iron hand of the Austrian dynasty was laid 
on it. The long wars with the Moslem invaders 
called every peasant into the field, and gave him a 
degree of personal consideration. In some of the 
provinces, as Catalonia, the Democratic spirit fre- 

X 



162 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

quently rose to an uncontrollable height. In this 
free atmosphere the rich and peculiar traits of na- 
tional character were unfolded. The territorial di- 
visions which marked the Peninsula, broken up an- 
ciently into a number of j)etty and independent 
states, gave, moreover, great variety to the national 
portraiture. The rude Asturian, the haughty and 
indolent Castilian, the industrious Aragonese, the 
independent Catalan, the jealous and wily Andalu- 
sian, the effeminate Valencian, and magnificent Gran- 
adine, furnished an infinite variety of character and 
costume for the study of the artist. The intermix- 
ture of Asiatic races, to an extent unknown in any 
other European land, was favourable to the same 
result. The Jews and the Moors were settled in 
too great numbers, and for too many centuries, in 
the land, not to have left traces of their Oriental 
civilization. The best blood of the country has 
flowed from what the modern Spaniard — the Span- 
iard of the Inquisition — regards as impure sources; 
and a work, popular in the Peninsula, under the 
name of Tizon de Espana, or " Brand of Spain,'' 
maliciously traces back the pedigrees of the noblest 
houses in the kingdom to a Jewish or Morisco ori- 
gin. All these circumstances have conspired to 
give a highly poetic interest to the character of the 
Spaniards ; to make them, in fact, the most pictu- 
resque of European nations, affording richer and far 
more various subjects for the novelist than other na- 
tions whose peculiarities have been kept down by 
the weight of a despotic government, or the artificial 
and levelling laws of fashion. 



CERVANTES. 163 

There is one other point of view in which the 
Don Quixote presents itself, that of its didactic im- 
port. It is not merely moral in its general tendency, 
though this was a rare virtue in the age in which it 
was written, but is replete with admonition and crit- 
icism, oftentimes requiring great boldness, as well as 
originality, in the author. Such, for instance, are 
the derision of witchcraft, and other superstitions 
common to the Spaniards ; the ridicule of torture, 
which, though not used in the ordinary courts, was 
familiar to the Inquisition ; the frequent strictures 
on various departments and productions of literature. 
The literary criticism scattered throughout the work 
shows a profound acquaintance with the true prin- 
ciples of taste far before his time, and which has 
left his judgments of the writings of his countrymen 
still of paramount authority. In truth, the great 
scope of his work was didactic, for it was a satire 
against the false taste of his age. And never w^as 
there a satire so completely successful. The last 
romance of chivalry, before the appearance of the 
Don Quixote, came out in 1602. It was the last 
that was ever published in Spain. So completely 
was this kind of writing, which had bade defiance 
to every serious effort, now extinguished by the 
breath of ridicule, 

" That soft and summer breath, whose subtile power 
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour." 

It was impossible for any new author to gain an 
audience. The pubKc had seen how the thunder 
was fabricated. The spectator had been behind the 



164 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

scenes, and witnessed of what cheap materials kings 
and queens were made. It was impossible for him, 
by any stretch of imagination, to convert the tinsel 
and painted bawbles which he had seen there into 
diadems and sceptres. The illusion had jfled forever. 

Satire seldom survives the local or temporary in- 
terests against which it is directed. It loses its life 
with its sting. The satire of Cervantes is an ex- 
ception. The objects at which it was aimed have 
long since ceased to interest. The modern reader 
is attracted to the book simply by its execution as 
a work of art, and, from want of previous knowledge, 
comprehends few of the allusions which gave such 
infinite zest to the perusal in its own day. Yet, 
under all these disadvantages, it not only maintains 
its popularity, but is far more widely extended, and 
enjoys far higher consideration, than in the life of 
its author. Such are the triumphs of genius !. 

Cervantes correctly appreciated his own work. 
He more than once predicted its popularity. " I will 
lay a wager," says Sancho, "that before long there 
will not be a chophouse, tavern, or barber's stall 
but will have a painting of our achievements." The 
honest squire's prediction was verified in his own 
day ; and the author might have seen paintings of 
his work on wood and on canvass, as well as cop- 
per-plate engravings of it. Besides several editions 
of it at home, it was printed, in his own time, in 
Portugal, Flanders, and Italy. Since that period it 
has passed into numberless editions both in Spain 
and other countries. It has been translated into 



CERVANTES. 165 

nearly every European toDgue over and over again; 
into English ten times, into French eight, and others 
less frequently. We w^ill close the present notice 
with a brief vievr of some of the principal editions, 
together w^ith that at the head of our article. 

The currency of the romance among all classes 
frequently invited its publication by incompetent 
hands; and the consequence v^as a plentiful crop 
of errors, until the original text was nearly despoiled 
of its beauty, while some passages were omitted, and 
foreign ones still more shamefully interpolated. The 
first attempt to retrieve the original from these har- 
pies, who thus foully violated it, singularly enough, 
was made in England, ftueen Caroline, the wife 
of George the Second, had formed a collection of 
books of romance, which she playfully named the 
" hbrary of the sage Merlin." The romance of Cer- 
vantes alone was wanting; and a nobleman, Lord 
Carteret, undertook to provide her with a suitable 
copy at his own expense. This was the origin of 
the celebrated edition published by Tonson, in Lon- 
don, 1738, 4 torn. 4to. It contained the Life of the 
Author, written for it by the learned Mayans y Sis- 
car. It was the first biography (which merits the 
name) of Cervantes ; and it shows into what obliv- 
ion his personal history had already falleu, that no 
less than seven towns claimed each the honour of 
giving him birth. The fate of Cervantes resembled 
that of Homer. 

The example thus set by foreigners excited an 
honourable emulation at home ; and at length, in 



166 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

1780, a magnificent edition, from the far-famed press 
of Ibarra, was published at Madrid, in 4 torn. 4to, 
under the auspices of the Royal Spanish Academy; 
which, unlike many other literary bodies of sound- 
ing name, has contributed most essentially to the 
advancement of letters, not merely by original me- 
moirs, but by learned and very beautiful editions of 
ancient writers. Its Don Quixote exhibits a most 
careful revision of the text, collated from the several 
copies printed in the author's lifetime, and supposed 
to have received his own emendations. There is 
too good reason to believe that these corrections 
were made with a careless hand ; at all events, there 
is a plentiful harvest of typographical blunders in 
these primitive editions. 

Prefixed to the publication of the Academy is the 
Life of Cervantes, by Rios, written with uncommon 
elegance, and containing nearly all that is of much 
interest in his personal history. A copious analysis of 
the romance follows, in which a parallel is closely 
elaborated between it and the poems of Homer. But 
the romantic and the classical differ too widely from 
each other to admit of such an approximation ; and 
the method of proceeding necessarily involves its 
author in infinite absurdities, which show an entire 
ignorance of the true principles of philosophical 
criticism, and which he would scarcely have fallen 
into had he given heed to the maxims of Cervantes 
himself 

In the following year, 1781, there appeared an- 
other edition in England deserving of particular 



CERVANTES. 167 

notice. It was prepared bj the Rev. Mr. Bowie, a 
clergyman at Idemestone, who was so enamoured 
of the romance of Cervantes, that, after coUectmg a 
library of such works as could any way illustrate his 
author, he spent fourteen years in preparing a suit- 
able commentary on him. There was ample scope 
for such a commentary. Many of the satirical al- 
lusions of the romance were misunderstood, as we 
have said, owing to ignorance of the books of chiv- 
alry at which they were aimed. Many incidents 
and usages, familiar to the age of Cervantes, had 
long since fallen into oblivion ; and much of the 
idiomatic phraseology had grown to be obsolete, 
and required explanation. Cervantes himself li^ 
fallen into some egregious blunders, which in his 
subsequent revision of the work he had neglected 
to set right. The reader will readily call to mind 
the confusion as to Sancho's Dapple, who appears 
and disappears, most unaccountably, on the scene, 
according as the author happens to remember or 
forget that he was stolen. He afterward corrected 
this in two or three instances, but left three or four 
others unheeded. To the same account must be 
charged numberless gross anachronisms. Indeed, 
the whole Second Part is an anachronism, since the 
author introduces his hero criticising his First Part, 
in which his own epitaph is recorded. 

Cervantes seems to have had a great distaste for 
the work of revision. Some of his blunders he laid 
at the printer's door, and others he dismissed with 
the remark, more ingenious than true, that they 



168 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

were like moles, which, though blemishes in them- 
selves, add to the beauty of the countenance. He 
little dreamed that his lapses were to be watched so 
narrowly, that a catalogue was actually to be set 
dovvn of all his repetitions and inconsistencies, and 
that each of his hero's salhes was to be adjusted by 
an accurate chronological table like any real history. 
He would have been still slower to believe that in 
the middle of the eighteenth century a learned so- 
ciety, the Academy of Literature and Fine Arts at 
Troyes, in Champagne, should have chosen a depu- 
tation of their body to visit Spain and examine the 
library of the Escurial, in order to obtain, if possi- 
ble, the original MS. of that Arabian sage from whom 
Cervantes professed to have translated his romance. 
This was to be more mad than Don Quixote him- 
self; yet this actually happened. 

Bowie's edition was printed in six volumes quar- 
to ; the two last contained notes, illustrations, and 
index, all, as zvell as the text, in Castilian. Watt, in 
his laborious " Bibliotheca Britannica," remarks, that 
the book did not come up to the pubhc expectation. 
If so, the pubhc must have been very unreasonable. 
It was a marvellous achievement for a foreigner. It 
was the first attempt at a commentary on the Quix- 
ote, and, although doubtless exhibiting inaccuracies 
which a native might have escaped, has been a rich 
mine of illustration, from which native critics have 
helped themselves most liberally, and sometimes with 
scanty acknowledgment. 

The example of the English critic led to similar 



CERYANTES. 169 

labours in Spain, among the most successful of which 
may be mentioned the edition by Peilicer, which has 
commended itself to every scholar by its very learn- 
ed disquisitions on many topics both of history and 
criticism. It also contains a valuable memoir of 
Cervantes, whose life has since been written in a 
manner which leaves nothing farther to be desired 
by Navarrete, well known by his laborious publica- 
tion of documents relative to the early Spanish dis- 
coveries. His biography of the novelist compre- 
hends all the information, direct and subsidiary, 
which can now be brought together for the eluci- 
dation of his personal or literary history. If Cer- 
vantes, like his great contemporary, Shakspeare, has 
left few authentic details of his existence, the defi- 
ciency has been dihgently supplied in both cases by 
speculation and conjecture. 

There was still wanting a classical commentary 
on the Quixote devoted to the literary execution of 
the work. Such a commentary has at length ap- 
peared from the pen of Clemencin, the accomplish- 
ed secretary of the Spanish Academy of History, 
who had acquired a high reputation for himself by 
the publication of the sixth volume of its memoirs, 
the exclusive work of his own hand. In his edition 
of the romance, besides illuminating with rare learn- 
ing many of the obscure points in the narrative, he 
has accompanied the text with a severe but enlight- 
ened criticism, which, while it boldly exposes occa- 
sional offences against taste or grammar, directs the 
eye to those latent beauties which might escape a 

Y 



170 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

rapid or an ordinary reader. We much doubt if 
any Castilian classic has been so ably illustrated. 
Unfortunately, the First Part only was completed 
by the commentator, who died very recently. It 
will not be easy to find a critic equally qualified by 
his taste and erudition for the completion of the 
w^ork. 

The English, as we have noticed, have evinced 
their rehsh for Cervantes, not only by their critical 
labours, but by repeated translations. Some of these 
are executed with much skill, considering the difii- 
culty of correctly rendering the idiomatic phrase- 
ology of humorous dialogue. The most popular 
versions are those of Motteux, Jarvis, and Smollett. 
Perhaps the first is the best of all. It was by a 
Frenchman, who came over to England in the time 
of James the Second. It betrays nothing of its for- 
eign parentage, however, while its rich and racy 
diction and its quaint turns of expression are admi- 
rably suited to convey a lively -and very faithful 
image of the original. The slight tinge of antiquity 
which belongs to the time is not displeasing, and 
comports well with the tone of knightly dignity 
which distinguishes the hero. Lockhart's notes 
and poetical versions of old Castilian ballads, ap- 
pended to the recent edition of Motteux, have ren- 
dered it by far the most desirable translation. It is 
sino;ular that the first classical edition of Den duix- 
ote, the first commentary, and probably the best for- 
eign translation, should have been all ]»)roduced in 
England ; and farther, that the Engh^h commenta- 



CERVANTES. 171 

tor should have w^ritten in Spanish, and the English 
translation have been by a Frenchman. 

We novi^ come to Mr. Sales's recent edition of 
the original, the first, probably, which has appeared 
in the New^ World, of the one half of which the 
Spanish is the spoken language. There was great 
need of some uaiiform edition to meet the wants of 
our University, where much inconvenience has been 
long experienced from the discrepancies of the cop- 
ies used. The only ones to be procured in this 
country are contemptible both in regard to printing 
and paper, and are defaced by the grossest errors. 
They are the careless manufacture of ill-informed 
Spanish booksellers, made to sell, and dear to boot. 

Mr. Sales has adopted a right plan for remedying 
these several evils. He has carefully formed his text 
on that of the last and most correct edition of the 
Academy, and as he has stereotyped the work, any 
verbal errors may be easily rectified. The Acade- 
my has substituted the modern orthography for that 
of Cervantes, who, independently of the change which 
has gradually taken place in the language, seems to 
have had no uniform system himself. Mr. Sales 
has conformed to the rules prescribed by this high 
authority for regulating his orthography, accent, and 
punctuation. In some instances, only, he has adopt- 
ed the ancient usage in beginning words with / in- 
stead of A, and retaining obsolete terminations of 
verbs, as Jiahlades for hahlais, hahlabades for hahlahais, 
amades ioxamais, amabades hr amabais,Scc., no doubt 
as better suited to the lofty tone of the good knight's 



172 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

discourses, who himself affected a reverence for the 
antique in his conversation to v^hich his translators 
have not always sufficiently attended. 

In one respect the present editor has made some 
alterations not before attempted, we beheve, in the 
text of his original. We have already noticed the 
inaccuracies of the early copies of the Don Quix- 
ote, partly imputable to Cervantes himself, and in a 
greater degree, doubtless, to his printers. There is 
no way of rectifying such errors by collation with 
the author's manuscript, which has long since disap- 
peared. All that can now be done, therefore, is to 
point out the purer reading in a note, as Clemencin, 
Anieta, and other commentators have done, or, as 
Mr. Sales has preferred, to introduce it into the body 
of the text. We will give one or two specimens of 
these alterations : 

" Poco mas 6 menos." — Tom. i., p. 141. 

The reading in the old editions is " poco mas a me- 
nos," a phrase as unintelligible in Spanish now as 
its literal translation would be in English, although 
in use, it would seem from other authorities, in the 
age of Cervantes. 

'' Por tales os juzgue y tuve." — Tom. i., p. 104, 

The old editions add "siempre," which clearly is in- 
correct, since Don Quixote is speaking of the pres- 
ent occasion. 

*' Don Quijote quedo admirado." — Tom. i., p. 143. 

Other editions read ''El cual quedo," &c. The use 



CERVANTES. 173 

of the relative leaves the reader in doubt who is in- 
tended, and Mr. Sales, in conformity to Clemencin's 
suggestion, has made the sentence clear by substitu- 
ting the name of the knight. 

" Donde tes sucedieron cosas," &c. — Tom. ii., p. 44. 

In other editions, "sucedid;" bad grammar, since it 
agrees with a plural noun. 

"En tan poco espacio de tiempo como ha que 
esfuvo alia," &c. (tom. ii., p. 132), instead of ''estd 
alia," clearly the wrong tense, since the verb refers 
to past time. 

It is unnecessary to multiply examples, a sufficient 
number of which have been cited to show on what 
principles the emendations have been made. They 
have been confined to the correction of such viola- 
tions of grammar, or such inaccuracies of expression, 
as obscure or distort the meaning. They have been 
made with great circumspection, and in obedience 
to the suggestion of the highest authorities in the 
language. For the critical scholar, who would nat- 
urally prefer the primitive text with all its impurities, 
they were not designed. But they are of infinite 
value to the general reader and the student, who may 
now read this beautiful classic purified from those 
verbal blemishes which, however obvious to a native, 
could not fail to mislead a foreigner. 

Besides these emendations, Mr. Sales has illustra- 
ted the work by prefixing to it the admirable prelim- 
inary discourse of Clemencin, and by a considerable 
body of notes, selected and abridged from the most 
approved commentators ; and as the object has been 



174 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

to explain the text to the reader, not to involve him 
in antiquarian or critical disquisitions, when his au- 
thorities have failed to do this, the editor has sup- 
plied notes of his own, throwing much hght on mat- 
ters least familiar to a foreigner. In this part of his 
work we think he might have derived considerable 
aid from Bowie, whom he does not appear to have 
consulted. The Castilian commentator, Arrieta, 
whom he liberally uses, is largely indebted to the 
English critic, who, as a foreigner, moreover, has 
been led into many seasonable explanations that 
would be superfluous to a Spaniard. 

We may notice another peculiarity in the present 
edition, that of breaking up the text into reasonable 
paragraphs, in imitation of the Enghsh translations; 
a great relief to the spirits of the reader, which are 
seriously damped, in the ancient copies, by the in- 
terminable waste of page upon page, without these 
convenient halting-places. 

But our readers, we fear, will think we are run- 
ning into an interminable waste of discussion. We 
will only remark, therefore, in conclusion, that the 
mechanical execution of the book is highly credita- 
able to our press. It is, moreover, adorned with 
etchings by our American Cruikshank, Johnston — 
some of them original, but mostly copies from the 
late English edition of Smollett's translations. They 
are designed and executed with much spirit, and, no 
doubt, would have fully satisfied honest Sancho, who 
predicted this kind of immortality for himself and 
his master. 



CERVANTES. 175 

We congratulate the public on the possession of 
an edition of the pride of Castilian literature from 
our own press, in so neat a form, and executed with 
so much correctness and judgment; and we trust 
that the ambition of its respectable editor will be 
gratified by its becoming, as it well deserves to be, 
the manual of the student in every seminary through- 
out the country where the noble Castihan language 
is taught. 



176 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

SIR WALTER SCOTT.* 

APRIL, 1838. 

There is do kind of writing, which has truth and 
instruction for its main object, so interesting and 
popular, on the whole, as biography. History, in 
its larger sense, has to deal with masses, which, while 
they divide the attention by the dazzling variety of 
objects, from their very generality are scarcely ca- 
pable of touching the heart. The great objects on 
which it is employed have httle relation to the daily 
occupations with which the reader is most intimate. 
A nation, hke a corporation, seems to have no soul, 
and its checkered vicissitudes may be contemplated 
rather with curiosity for the lessons they convey 
than with personal sympathy. How different are 
the feelings excited by the fortunes of an individual 
— one of the mighty mass, who in the page of his- 
tory is swept along the current unnoticed and un- 
known ! Instead of a mere abstraction, at once we 
see a being like ourselves, " fed with the same food, 
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same 
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and 
cooled by the same winter and summer" as we are. 
We place ourselves in his position, and see the 
passing current of events with the same eyes. We 

* 1. "Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., by J. G. Lock- 
hart. Five vols. 12mo. Boston : Otis, Broaders, & Co., 1837." 

2. " Recollections of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 16mo. London : James 
Fraser, 1837." 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 177 

become a party to all his little schemes, share in his 
triumphs, or mourn with him in the disappointment 
of defeat. His friends become our friends. We 
learn to take an interest in their characters from 
their relation to him. As they pass away from the 
stage one after another, and as the clouds of mis- 
fortune, perhaps, or of disease, settle around the 
evening of his own day, we feel the same sadness 
that steals over us on a retrospect of earlier and 
happier hours. And when at last we have followed 
him to the tomb, we close the volume, and feel that 
we have turned over another chapter in the history 
of life. 

On the same principles, probably, we are more 
moved by the exhibition of those characters whose 
days have been passed in the ordinary routine of 
domestic and social life than by those most inti- 
mately connected with the great public events of 
their age. What, indeed, is the history of such 
men but that of the times 1 The life of WeUing- 
ton or of Bonaparte is the story of the wars and 
revolutions of Europe. But that of Cowper, gliding 
away in the seclusion of rural soHtude, reflects all 
those domestic joys, and, alas ! more than the sor- 
rows, which gather around every man's fireside and 
his heart. In this way the story of the humblest 
individual, faithfully recorded, becomes an object of 
hvely interest. How much is that interest increas- 
ed in the case of a man like Scott, who, from his 
own fireside, has sent forth a voice to cheer and 
delight millions of his fellow-men ; whose life was 

Z 



178 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

passed within the narrow circle of his own village, 
as it were, but who, nevertheless, has called up more 
shapes and fantasies within that magic circle, acted 
more extraordinary parts, and afforded more marvels 
for the imagination to feed on, than can be furnish- 
ed by the most nimble-footed, nimble-tongued trav- 
eller, from Marco Polo down to Mrs. Trollope, and 
that literary Sinbad, Captain Hall. 

Fortunate as Sir Walter Scott was in his life, it 
is not the least of his good fortunes that he left the 
task of recording it to one so competent as Mr. 
Lockhart, who, to a familiarity with the person 
and habits of his illustrious subject, unites such en- 
tire sympathy with his pursuits, and such fine tact 
and discrimination in arranging the materials for 
their illustration. We have seen it objected that 
the biographer has somewhat transcended his law- 
ful Hmits in occasionally exposing what a nice ten- 
derness for the reputation of Scott should have led 
him to conceal ; but, on reflection, we are not 
inclined to adopt these views. It is difficult to 
prescribe any precise rule by which the biographer 
should be guided in exhibiting the peculiarities, and, 
still more, the defects of his subject. He should, 
doubtless, be slow to draw from obscurity those 
matters which are of a strictly personal and private 
nature, particularly when they have no material 
bearing on the character of the individual. But 
whatever the latter has done, said, or written to 
others can rarely be made to come within this rule. 
A swell of panegyric, where everything is in broad 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 179 

sunshine, without the reUef of a shadow to contrast 
it, is out of nature, and must bring discredit on the 
whole. Nor is it much better when a sort of twi- 
light mystification is spread over a man's actions, 
until, as«in the case of all biographies of Cowper 
previous to that of Southey, we are completely be- 
wildered respecting the real motives of conduct. If 
ever there was a character above the necessity of 
any management of this sort, it was Scott's ; and 
we cannot but think that the frank exposition of the 
minor blemishes which sully it, by securing the con- 
fidence of the reader in the general fidelity of the 
portraiture, and thus disposing him to receive, with- 
out distrust, those favourable statements in his his- 
tory which might seem incredible, as they certainly 
are unprecedented, is, on the whole, advantageous 
to his reputation. As regards the moral effect on 
the reader, we may apply Scott's own argument for 
not always recompensing suffering virtue, at the 
close of his fictions, with temporal prosperity — that 
such an arrangement would convey no moral to 
the heart whatever, since a glance at the great 
picture of life would show that virtue is not always 
thus rewarded. 

In regard to the literary execution of Mr. Lock- 
hart's work, the public voice has Jong since pro- 
nounced on it. A prying criticism may discern a 
few of those contraband epithets and slipshod sen- 
tences, more excusable in ijoung "Peter's Letters to 
his Kinsfolk," where, indeed, they are thickly sown, 
than in the production of a grave Aristarch of 



180 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

British criticism. But this is small game, where 
every reader of the least taste and sensibility must 
find so much to applaud. It is enough to say, that 
in passing from the letters of Scott, with which the 
work is enriched, to the text of the biographer, we 
find none of those chilUng transitions which occur 
on the like occasions in more bungling productions; 
as, for example, in that recent one in which the un- 
fortunate Hannah More is done to death by her 
fiiend Roberts. On the contrary, we are sensible 
only to a new variety of beauty in the style of com- 
position. The correspondence is illumined by all 
that is needed to make it intelligible to a stranger, 
and selected with such discernment as to produce 
the clearest impression of the character of its author. 
The mass of interesting details is conveyed in lan- 
guage, richly coloured with poetic sentiment, and, at 
the same time, without a tinge of that mysticism 
which, as Scott himself truly remarked, " will never 
do for a writer of fiction, no, nor of history, nor 
moral essays, nor sermons ;" but which, nevertheless, 
finds more or less favour in our own community, 
at the present day, in each and all of these. 

The second work which we have placed at the 
head of this article, and from which the last remark 
of Sir Walter's was borrowed, is a series of notices 
originally published in " Fraser's Magazine," but 
now collected, with considerable additions, into a 
separate volume. Its author, Mr. Robert Pierce Gil- 
lies, is a gentleman of the Scotch bar, favourably 
known by translations from the German. The 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 181 

work conveys a lively report of several scenes and 
events, which, before the appearance of Lockharf s 
book, were of more interest and importance than 
they can now be, lost, as they are, in the flood of 
light which is poured on us from that source. In 
the absence of the sixth and last volume, however, 
Mr. Gillies may help us to a few particulars respect- 
ing the closing years of Sir Walter's hfe, that may 
have some novelty — we know not how much to be 
reUed on — for the reader. In the present notice of 
a work so famiUar to most persons, we shall confine 
ourselves to some of those circumstances which 
contribute to form, or have an obvious connexion 
with, his literary character. 

Walter Scott was born at Edinburgh, August 
15th, 1771. The character of his father, a respect- 
able member of that class of attorneys who in Scot- 
land are called Writers to the Signet, is best con- 
veyed to the reader by saying that he sat for the 
portrait of Mr. Saunders Fairford in " Redgauntlet." 
His mother was a woman of taste and imagination, 
and had an obvious influence in guiding those of 
her son. His ancestors, by both father's and moth- 
er's side, were of " gentle blood," a position which, 
placed between the highest and the lower ranks in 
society, was extremely favourable, as affording facil- 
ities for communication with both. A lameness in 
his infancy — a most fortunate lameness for the 
world, if, as Scott says, it spoiled a soldier — and a 
delicate constitution, made it expedient to try the 
efficacy of country air and diet, and he was placed 



182 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

under the roof of his paternal grandfather at Sandj- 
Knowe, a few miles distant from the capital. Here 
his days were passed in the open fields, " with no 
other fellowship," as he says, "than that of the 
sheep and lambs ;" and here, in the lap of Nature, 

" Meet nurse for a poetic child," 

his infant vision was greeted with those rude, ro- 
mantic scenes which liis own verses have since hal- 
lowed for the pilgrims from every chme. In the 
long evenings, his imagination, as he grew older, 
w^as warmed by traditionary legends of border hero- 
ism and adventure, repeated by the aged relative, 
who had herself witnessed the last gleams of border 
chivalry. His memory was one of the first powers 
of his mind which exhibited an extraordinary devel- 
opment. One of the longest of these old ballads, in 
particular, stuck so close to it, and he repeated it 
with such stentorian vociferation, as to draw from 
the minister of a neighbouring kirk the testy excla- 
mation, " One may as well speak in the mouth of a 
cannon as where that child is." 

On his removal to Edinburgh, in his eighth year, 
he was subjected to different influences. His wor- 
thy father was a severe martinet in all the forms of 
his profession, and, it may be added, of his rehgion, 
which he contrived to make somewhat burdensome 
to his more volatile son. The tutor was still more 
strict in his religious sentiments, and the hghtest lit- 
erary diversion in which either of them indulged 
was such as could be gleaned from the time-honour- 
ed folios of Archbishop Spottiswoode or worthy 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 183 

Robert Wodrow. Even here, however, Scott's 
young mind contrived to gather materials and im- 
pulses for future action. In his long arguments with 
Master Mitchell, he became steeped in the history 
of the Covenanters and the persecuted Church of 
Scotland, while he was still more rooted in his own 
Jacobite notions, early instilled into his mind by the 
tales of his relatives of Sandy-Knowe, whose own 
family had been out in the " affair of forty-five." 
Amid the professional and polemical worthies of his 
father's library, Scott detected a copy of Shakspeare, 
and he relates with what gout he used to creep out 
of his bed, where he had been safely deposited for 
the night, and, by the light of the fire, in pur is natu- 
ralihus, pore over the pages of the great magician, 
and study those mighty spells by which he gave to 
airy fantasies the forms and substance of humanity. 
Scott distinctly recollected the time and the spot 
where he first opened a volume of Percy's " Rel- 
iques of English Poetry ;" a work which may have 
suggested to him the plan and the purpose of the 
" Border Minstrelsy." Every day's experience shows 
how much more actively the business of education 
goes on out of school than in it ; and Scott's his- 
tory shows equally that genius, whatever obstacles 
may be thrown in its way in one direction, will find 
room for its expansion in another, as the young 
tree sends forth its shoots most prolific in that quar- 
ter where the sunshine is permitted to fall on it. 

At the High School, in which he was placed by 
his father at an early period, he seems not to have 



184 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

been particularly distinguished in the regular course 
of studies. His voracious appetite for books, how- 
ever, of a certain cast, as romances, chivalrous tales, 
and worm-eaten chronicles scarcely less chivalrous, 
and his wonderful memory for such reading as struck 
his fancy, soon made him regarded by his fellows as 
a phenomenon of black-letter scholarship, which, in 
process of time, achieved for him the cognomen of 
that redoubtable schoolman. Duns Scotus. , He now 
also gave evidence of his powers of creation as well 
as of acquisition. He became noted for his own 
stories, generally bordering on the marvellous, with 
a plentiful seasoning of knight-errantry, which suited 
his bold and chivalrous temper. " Shnk over beside 
me, Jamie," he would whisper to his schoolfellow 
Ballantyne, " and I'll tell you a story." Jamie was, 
indeed, destined to sit beside him during the greater 
part of his life. 

The same tastes and talents continued to display 
themselves more strongly with increasing years. 
Having beaten pretty thoroughly the ground of ro- 
mantic and legendary lore, at least so far as the 
Enghsh libraries to which he had access would per- 
mit, he next endeavoured, while at the University, 
to which he had been transferred from the High 
School, to pursue the same subject in the Continent- 
al languages. Many were the strolls which he took 
in the neighbourhood, especially to Arthur's Seat 
and Salisbury Crags, where, perched on some almost 
inaccessible eyry, he might be seen conning over 
his Ariosto or Cervantes, or some other bard of ro- 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 185 

mance, with some favourite companion of his stud- 
ies, or pouring into the ears of the latter his own 
boyish legends, glowing with 

** achievements high, 
And circumstance of chivalry." 

A critical knowledge of these languages he seems 
not to have obtained, and even in the French 
made but an indifferent figure in conversation. An 
accurate acquaintance with the pronunciation and 
prosody of a foreign tongue is undoubtedly a de- 
sirable accomplishment; but it is, after all, a mere 
accomplishment subordinate to the great purposes 
for which a language is to be learned. Scott did not, 
as is too often the case, mistake the shell for the 
kernel. He looked on language only as the key to 
unlock the foreign stores of wisdom, the pearls of 
inestimable price, wherever found, with which to en- 
rich his native literature. 

After a brief residence at the University, he was 
regularly indented as an apprentice to his father in 
1786. One can hardly imagine a situation less con- 
genial with the ardent, effervescing spirit of a poetic 
fancy, fettered down to a daily routine of drudgery 
scarcely above that of a mere scrivener. It proved, 
however, a useful school of discipline to him. It 
formed early habits of method, punctuality, and la- 
borious industry ; business habits, in short, most ad- 
verse to the poetic temperament, but indispensable 
to the accomplishment of the gigantic tasks which 
he afterward assumed. He has himself borne testi- 
mony to his general diligence in his new vocation, and 

A A 



186 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tells US that on one occasion lie transcribed no less 
than a hundred and twenty folio pages at a sitting. 
In the midst of these mechanical duties, he did 
not lose sight of the favourite objects of his study 
and meditation. He made frequent excursions into 
the Lowland as well as Highland districts in search 
of traditionary relics. These pilgrimages he fre- 
quently performed on foot. His constitution, now 
become hardy by severe training, made him care- 
less of exposure, and his frank and warm-hearted 
manners — eminently favourable to his purposes, by 
thawing at once any feelings of frosty reserve which 
might have encountered a stranger — made him 
equally welcome at the staid and decorous manse, 
and at the rough but hospitable board of the peas- 
ant. Here was, indeed, the study of the future nov- 
elist; the very school in which to meditate those 
models of character and situation which he was af- 
terward, long afterward, to transfer, in such living 
colours, to the canvass. " He was makin' himsell 
a' the time," says one of his companions, "but he^ 
didna ken, maybe, what he was about till years had 
passed. At first he thought o' little, I dare say, but 
the queerness and the fun." The honest writer to 
the signet does not seem to have thought it either 
so funny or so profitable ; for on his son's return 
from one of these raids, as he styled them, the old 
gentleman peevishly inquired how he had been liv- 
ing so long. "Pretty much like the young ravens," 
answered Walter; "I only wished I had been as 
good a player on the flute as poor George Primrose 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 187 

in the Vicar of Wakefield. If I had his art, I should 
like nothing better than to tramp like him from cot- 
tage to cottage over the world." "I doubt," said 
the grave clerk to the signet, "I greatly doubt, sir, 
you were born for nae better than a gangrel scrape- 
gut T Perhaps even the revelation, could it have 
been made to him, of his son's future literary glory, 
would scarcely have satisfied the worthy father, who, 
probably, would have regarded a seat on the bench 
of the Court of Sessions as much higher glory. At 
all events, this was not far from the judgment of 
Dominie Mitchell, who, in his notice of his illustri- 
ous pupil, " sincerely regrets that Sir Walter's pre- 
cious time was devoted to the duke rather than the 
Mile of composition, and that his great talents should 
have been wasted on such subjects !" 

It is impossible to glance at Scott's early life 
without perceiving how powerfully all its circum- 
stances, whether accidental or contrived, conspired 
to train him for the pecuhar position he was des- 
tined to occupy in the world of letters. There nev- 
er was a character in whose infant germ the mature 
and fully-developed lineaments might be more dis- 
tinctly traced. What he was in his riper age, so 
he was in his boyhood. We discern the same tastes, 
the same peculiar talents, the same social temper and 
affections, and, in a great degree, the same habits — 
in their embryo state, of course, but distinctly mark- 
ed — and his biographer has show^n no little skill in 
enabling us to trace their gradual, progressive ex- 
pansion, from the hour of his birth up to the full 
prime and maturity of manhood. 



188 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

In 1792, Scott, whose original destination of a 
writer had been changed to that of an advocate — 
from his father's conviction, as it would seem, of the 
superiority of his talents to the former station — was 
admitted to the Scottish bar. Here he continued 
in assiduous attendance during the regular terms, 
bat more noted for his stories in the Outer House 
than his arguments in court. It may appear sin- 
gular, that a person so gifted, both as a writer and 
as a raconteur, should have had no greater success 
in his profession. But the case is not uncommon. 
Indeed, experience shows that the most eminent 
writers have not made the most successful speakers. 
It is not more strange than that a good writer of 
novels should not excel as a dramatic author. Pei^ 
haps a consideration of the subject would lead us to 
refer the phenomena in both cases to the same prin- 
ciple. At all events, Scott was an exemplification 
of both, and we leave the solution to those who 
have more leisure and ingenuity to unravel the mys- 
tery. 

Scott's leisure, in the mean time, was well employ- 
ed in storing his mind with German romance, with 
whose wild fictions, intrenching on the grotesque, 
he found at that time more sympathy than in later 
life. In 1796 he first appeared before the public as 
a translator of Biirger's well-known ballads, thrown 
off by him at a heat, and which found favour with 
the few into whose hands they passed. He subse- 
quently adventured in Monk Lewis's crazy bark, 
" Tales of Wonder," which soon went to pieces, 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 189 

leaving, however, among its surviving fragments the 
scattered contributions of Scott. 

At last, in 1802, he gave to the world his first two 
volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," printed by his 
old schoolfellow Ballantyne, and which, by the beau- 
ty of the typography, as well as literary execution, 
made an epoch in Scottish literary history. There 
was no work of Scott's after life which showed the 
result of so much preliminary labour. Before ten 
years old, he had collected several volumes of bal- 
lads and traditions, and we have seen how diligent- 
ly he pursued the same vocation in later years. 
The publication was admitted to be far more faith- 
ful, as well as skilfully collated, than its prototype, 
the " Reliques" of Bishop Percy ; while his notes 
contained a mass of antiquarian information relative 
to border life, conveyed in a style of beauty unpre- 
cedented in topics of this kind, and enhvenod with 
a higher interest than poetic fiction. Percy's " Rel- 
iques" had prepared the way for the kind reception 
of the " Minstrelsy," by the general relish — notwith- 
standing Dr. Johnson's protest — it had created for 
the simple pictures of a pastoral and heroic time. 
Burns had since familiarized the English ear with 
the Doric melodies of his native land ; and now a 
greater than Burns appeared, whose first production, 
by a singular chance, came into the world in the very 
year in which the Ayrshire minstrel was withdrawn 
from it, as if Nature had intended that the chain of 
poetic inspiration should not be broken. The de- 
light of the public was farther augmented on the ap- 



190 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELEAMES. 

pearance of the third volume of the " Minstrelsy," 
containing various imitations of the old ballad, which 
displayed the' rich fashion of the antique, purified 
from the mould and rust by which the beauties of 
such weather-beaten trophies are defaced. 

The first edition of the " Minstrelsy," consisting 
of eight hundred copies, went off, as Lockhart tells 
us, in less than a year ; and the poet, on the publi- 
cation of a second, received five hundred pounds 
sterhng from Longman — an enormous price for such 
a commodity, but the best bargain, probably, that 
the bookseller ever made, as the subsequent sale has 
since extended to twenty thousand copies. 

Scott was not in great haste to follow up his suc- 
cess. It was three years later before he took the 
field as an independent author, in a poem which at 
once placed him among the great original writers 
of his country. The "Lay of the Last Minstrel," 
a complete expansion of the ancient ballad into an 
epic form, was published in 1805. It was opening 
a new creation in the realm of fancy. It seemed as 
if the author had transfused into his page the strong 
delineations of the Homeric pencil, the rude, but 
generous gallantry of a primitive period, softened by 
the more airy and magical inventions of Italian ro- 
mance,* and conveyed in tones of natural melody, 
such as had not been heard since the strains of 

* " Mettendo lo Turpin, lo metto ancti' io," 

says Ariosto, playfully, when he tells a particularly tough story. 

" I cannot tell how the truth may be, 

I say the tale as 'twas said to me," 

says the 'author of the " Lay" on a similar occasion. The resemblance 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 191 

Burns. The book speedily found that unprecedent- 
ed circulation which all his subsequent compositions 
attained. Other writers had addressed themselves 
to a more peculiar and limited feeling; to a nar- 
rower, and, generally, a more select audience. But 
Scott was found to combine all the qualities of in- 
terest for every order. He drew from the pure 
springs which gush forth in every heart. His nar- 
rative chained every reader's attention by the stir- 
ring variety of its incidents, while the fine touches 
of sentiment with which it abounded, like wild flow- 
ers, springing up spontaneously around, were full of 
freshness and beauty, that made one wonder others 
should not have stooped to gather them before. 

The success of the " Lay" determined the course 
of its author's future life. Notwithstanding his punc- 
tual attention to his profession, his utmost profits for 
any one year of the ten he had been in practice had 
not exceeded two hundred and thirty pounds ; and 
of late they had sensibly declined. Latterly, indeed, 
he had coqueted somewhat too openly with the 
Muse for his professional reputation. Themis has 
always been found a stern and jealous mistress, chary 
of dispensing her golden favours to those who are 
seduced into a flirtation with her more volatile sister, 

Scott, however, soon found himself in a situation 
that made him independent of her favours. His in- 

might be traced much farther than mere forms of expression, to the Ital- 
ian, who, like 

" the Ariosto of the North, 
Sung ladye-love, and war, romance, and knightly worth." 



192 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

come from the two offices to which he was pro- 
moted, of Sheriff of Selkh'k, and Clerk of the Comt 
of Sessions, was so ample, combined with what fell 
to liim by inheritance and marriage, that he was 
left at liberty freely to consult his own tastes. Amid 
the seductions of poetry, however, he never shrunk 
from his burdensome professional duties ; and he 
submitted to all their drudgery w^ith unflinching con- 
stancy, when the labours of his pen made the emolu- 
ments almost beneath consideration. He never rel- 
ished the idea of being divorced from active life by 
the solitary occupations of a recluse. And his of- 
ficial functions, however severely they taxed his time, 
may be said to have, in some degree, compensated 
him by the new scenes of life which they were con- 
stantly disclosing — the very materials of those fic- 
tions on which his fame and his fortune were to be 
built. 

Scott's situation was eminently propitious to lit- 
erary pursuits. He was married, and passed the 
better portion of the year in the country, where the 
quiet pleasures of his fireside circle, and a keen rel- 
ish for rural sports, relieved his mind, and invigorated 
both health and spirits. In early life, it seems, he 
had been crossed in love; and, Hke Dante and Byron, 
to whom, in this respect, he is often compared, he 
had more than once, according to his biographer, 
shadowed forth in his verses the object of his unfor- 
tunate passion. He does not appear to have taken 
it very seriously, however, nor to have shown the 
morbid sensibility in relation to it discovered by both 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 193 

Byron and Dante, whose stern and solitary natures 
were cast in a very different mould from the social 
temper of Scott. 

His next great poem was his *' Marmion/' trans- 
cending, in the judgment of many, all his other epics, 
and containing, in the judgment of all, passages of 
poetic fire which he never equalled, but which, 
nevertheless, was greeted on its entrance into the 
world by a critique, in the leading journal of the 
day, of the most caustic and unfriendly temper. 
The journal was the Edinburgh, to which he had 
been a frequent contributor, and the reviewer was 
his intimate friend, Jeffrey. The unkindest cut in 
the article was the imputation of a neglect of Scot- 
tish character and feeling. " There is scarcely one 
trait of true Scottish nationahty or patriotism intro- 
duced into the whole poem ; and Mr. Scott's only 
expression of admiration for the beautiful country 
to which he belongs is put, if we rightly remember, 
into the mouth of one of his Southern favourites." 
This of Walter Scott ! 

Scott was not slow, after this, in finding the po- 
litical principles of the Edinburgh so repugnant to 
his own (and they certainly were as opposite as the 
poles), that he first dropped the journal, and next la- 
boured with unwearied diligence to organize an- 
other, whose main purpose should be to counteract 
the heresies of the former. This was the origin of 
the London Quarterly, more imputable to Scott's 
exertions than to those of any, indeed all other per- 
sons. The result has been, doubtless, highly ser- 

B B 



194 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

viceable to the interests of both morals and letters. 
Not that the new Review was conducted with more 
fairness, or, in this sense, principle, than its antago- 
nist. A remark of Scott's own, in a letter to Ellis, 
shows with how much principle. "I have run up 
an attempt on ' The Curse of Kehama' for the 
Cluarterly. It affords cruel openings to the quiz- 
zers, and I suppose will get it roundly in the Edin- 
burgh Review. I would have made a very differ- 
ent hand of it, indeed, had the order of the day been 
pour dechirerr But, although the fate of the indi- 
vidual was thus, to a certain extent, a matter of ca- 
price, or, rather, prejudgment in the critic, yet the 
great abstract questions in morals, pohtics, and lit- 
erature, by being discussed on both sides, were pre- 
sented in a fuller, and, of course, fairer light to the 
public. Another beneficial result to letters was — 
and we shall gain credit, at least, for candour in 
confessing it — that it broke down somewhat of that 
divinity which hedged in the despotic im of the re- 
viewer, so long as no rival arose to contest the scep- 
tre. The claims to infallibility, so long and slavish- 
ly acquiesced in, fell to the ground when thus stout- 
ly asserted by conflicting parties. It was pretty 
clear that the same thing could not be all black and 
all white at the same time. In short, it was the old 
story of pope and anti-pope ; and the public began 
to find out that there might be hopes for the salva- 
tion of an author, though damned by the literary 
popedom. Time, by reversmg many of its decisions, 
must at length have shown the same thing 



I 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 195 

But to return. Scott showed how nearly he had 
been touched to the quick by two other acts not so 
discreet. These were, the establishment of an An- 
nual Register, and of the great publishing house of 
the Ballantynes, in which he became a silent part- 
ner. The last step involved him in grievous embar- 
rassments, and stimulated him to exertions which 
required " a frame of adamant and soul of fire." At 
the same time, we find him overwhelmed with poet- 
ical, biographical, historical, and critical composi- 
tions, together with editorial labours of appalling 
magnitude. In this multiplication of himself in a 
thousand forms, we see him always the same, vigor- 
ous and effective. " Poetry," he says in one of his 
letters, "is a scourging crop, and ought not to be 
hastily repeated. Editing, therefore, may be con- 
sidered as a green crop of turnips or pease, extremely 
useful to those whose circumstances do not admit 
of giving their farm a summer fallow." It might be 
regretted, however, that he should have wasted pow- 
ers fitted for so much higher culture on the coarse 
products of a kitchen garden, w^hich might have 
been safely trusted to inferior hands. 

In 1811, Scott gave to the world his exquisite 
poem, " The Lady of the Lake." One of his fair 
friends had remonstrated with him on thus risking 
again the laurel he had already won. He replied, 
with characteristic, and, indeed, prophetic spirit, " If 
I fail, I will write p'ose all my life. But if I succeed, 

* Up wi' the bonnie blue bonnet, 
The dirk and the feather an a' !' " 



196 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

In his eulogy on Byron, Scott remarks, " There has 
been no reposing under the shade of his laurels, no 
living upon the resource of past reputation ; none of 
that coddling and petty precaution which little au- 
thors call * taking care of their fame.' Byron let his 
fame take care of itself." Scott could not have 
more accurately described his own character. 

The " Lady of the Lake" was welcomed with an 
enthusiasm surpassing that which attended any oth- 
er of his poems. It seemed like the sweet breath- 
ings of his native pibroch, stealing over glen and 
mountain, and calling up all the dehcious associa- 
tions of rural solitude, which beautifully contrasted 
with the din of battle and the shrill cry of the war- 
trumpet, that stirred the soul in every page of his 
" Marmion." The publication of this work carried 
his fame as a poet to its most brilhant height. The 
post-horse duty rose to an extraordinary degree in 
Scotland, from the eagerness of travellers to visit 
the localities of the poem. A more substantial evi- 
dence was afforded in its amazing circulation, and, 
consequently, its profits. The press could scarcely 
keep pace with the public demand, and no less than 
fifty thousand copies of it have been sold since the 
date of its appearance. The successful author re- 
ceived more than two thousand guineas from his 
production. Milton received ten pounds for the 
two editions which he lived to see of his " Paradise 
Lost." The Ayrshire bard had sighed for " a lass 
wi' a tocher." Scott had now found one where it 
was hardly to be expected, in the Muse. 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 197 

While the poetical fame of Scott was thus at its 
zenith, a new star rose above the horizon, whose 
eccentric course and dazzling radiance completely 
bewildered the spectator. In 1812, " Childe Har- 
old" appeared, and the attention seemed to be now 
called, for the first time, from the outward form of 
man and visible nature, to the secret depths of the 
soul. The darkest recesses of human passion were 
laid open, and the note of sorrow was prolonged in 
tones of agonized sensibility, the more touching as 
coming from one who was placed on those dazzling 
heights of rank and fashion which, to the vulgar 
eye at least, seem to he in unclouded sunshine. 
Those of the present generation who have heard 
only the same key thrummed ad nauseam by the fee- 
ble imitators of his lordship, can form no idea of the 
effect produced when the chords were first swept by 
the master's fingers. It was found impossible for 
the ear, once attuned to strains of such compass and 
ravishing harmony, to return with the same relish to 
purer, it might be, but tamer melody ; and the sweet 
voice of the Scottish minstrel lost much of its power 
to charm, let him charm never so wisely. While 
" Rokeby" was in preparation, bets were laid on the 
rival candidates by the wits of the day. The sale 
of this poem, though great, showed a sensible de- 
cline in the popularity of its author. This became 
still more evident on the pubhcation of " The Lord 
of the Isles ;" and Scott admitted the conviction 
with his characteristic spirit and good-nature. 
"'Well, James' (he said to his printer), 'I have giv- 



198 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

en you a week — what are people saying about the 
Lord of the Isles V I hesitated a little, after the 
fashion of Gil Bias, but he speedily brought the 
matter to a point. ' Come,' he said, ' speak out, my 
good fellow ; what has put it into your head to be 
on so much ceremony ivith me all of a sudden? But 
I see how it is ; the result is given in one word — 
Disappointment! My silence admitted his infer- 
ence to the fullest extent. His countenance cer- 
tainly did look rather blank for a few seconds ; in 
truth, he had been wholly unprepared for the event. 
At length he said, with perfect cheerfulness, 'Well, 
well, James, so be it ; but you know we must not 
droop, for we can't afford to give over. Since one 
hne has failed, we must stick to something else.'" 
This something else was a mine he had already hit 
upon, of invention and substantial wealth, such as 
Thomas the Rhymer, or Michael Scott, or any other 
adept in the black art had never dreamed of 

Everybody knows the story of the composition of 
"Waverley"— the most interesting story in the annals 
of letters — and how, some ten years after its com- 
mencement, it was fished out of some old lumber 
in an attic, and completed in a few weeks for the 
press in 1814. Its appearance marks a more dis- 
tinct epoch in English literature than that of the 
poetry of its author. All previous attempts in the 
same school of fiction — a school of English growth 
— had been cramped by the limited information or 
talent of the writers. Smollett had produced his 
spirited sea-pieces, and Fielding his warm sketches 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 199 

of country life, both of them mixed up with so much 
Bilhngsgate as required a strong flavour of wit to 
make them tolerable. Richardson had covered 
acres of canvass with his faithful family pictures. 
Mrs. Radchffe had dipped up to the elbows in hor- 
rors ; while Miss Burney's fashionable gossip, and 
Miss Edgeworth's Hogarth drawings of the prose — 
not the poetry— of life and character, had each and 
all found favour in their respective ways. But a 
work now appeared in which the author swept over 
the whole range of character with entire freedom as 
well as fidelity, ennobling the whole by high historic 
associations, and in a style varying with his theme, 
but whose pure and classic flow was tinctured with 
just so much of poetic colouring as suited the pur- 
poses of romance. It was Shakspeare in prose. 

The work was published, as we know, anony- 
mously. Mr. GilHes states, however, that, while in 
the press, fragments of it were communicated to 
" Mr. Mackenzie, Dr. Brown, Mi"^. Hamilton, and 
other savans or savantes, whose dicta on the merits 
of a new novel were considered unimpeachable." 
By their approbation " a strong body of friends was 
formed, and the curiosity of the public prepared the 
way for its reception." This may explain the ra- 
pidity with which the anonymous publication rose 
into a degree of favour, which, though not less sure- 
ly, perhaps, it might have been more slow in achiev- 
ing. The author jealously preserved his incognito, 
and, in order to heighten the mystification, flung ofl*, 
almost simultaneously, a variety of works, in prose 



200 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

and poetry, any one of which might have been the 
labour of months. The public for a moment was at 
fault. There seemed to be six Richmonds in the 
field. The world, therefore, was reduced to the di- 
lemma of either supposing that half a dozen differ- 
ent hands could work in precisely the same style, or 
that one could do the work of half a dozen. With 
time, however, the veil wore thinner and thinner, 
until at length, and long before the ingenious argu- 
ment of Mr. Adolphus, there was scarcely a critic so 
purblind as not to discern behind it the features of 
the mighty minstrel. 

Constable had offered seven hundred pounds for 
the new novel. " It was," says Mr. Lockhart, " ten 
times as much as Miss Edge worth ever realized from 
any of her popular Irish tales." Scott declined the 
offer, which had been a good one for the bookseller 
had he made it as many thousand. But it passed 
the art of necromancy to divine this. 

Scott, once entered on this new career, followed 
it up with an energy unrivalled in the history of lit- 
erature. The public mind was not suffered to cool 
for a moment, before its attention was called to an- 
other miracle of creation from the same hand. Even 
illness, that would have broken the spirits of most 
men, as it prostrated the physical energies of Scott, 
opposed no impediment to the march of composi- 
tion. When he could no longer write he could 
dictate, and in this way, amid the agonies of a rack- 
ing disease, he composed " The Bride of Lammer- 
moor," the " Legend of Montrose," and a great part 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 201 

of " Ivanhoe." The first, indeed, is darkened with 
those deep shadows that might seem thrown over it 
by the sombre condition of its author. But what 
shall we say of the imperturbable dry humour of the 
gallant Captain Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket, 
or of the gorgeous revelries of Ivanhoe — 

"Such sights as youthful poets dream, 
On summer eves by haunted stream" — 

what shall we say of such brilliant day-dreams for a 
bed of torture 1 Never before had the spirit triumph- 
ed over such agonies of the flesh. " The best way," 
said Scott, in one of his talks with GiUies, " is, if 
possible, to triumph over disease by setting it at de- 
fiance ; somewhat on the same principle as one 
avoids being stung by boldly grasping a nettle." 

The prose fictions were addressed to a much lar- 
ger audience than the poems could be. They had 
attractions for every age and every class. The prof- 
its, of course, were commensurate. Arithmetic has 
never been so severely taxed as in the computation 
of Scott's productions and the proceeds resulting 
from them. In one year he received (or, more prop- 
erly, was credited with, for it is somewhat doubtful 
how much he actually received) fifteen thousand 
pounds for his novels, comprehending the first edi- 
tion and the copyright. The discovery of this rich 
mine furnished its fortunate proprietor with the 
means of gratifying the fondest and even most chi- 
merical desires. He had always coveted the situ- 
ation of a lord of acres — a Scottish laird — where his 
passion for planting might find scope in the creation 

Cc 



\ 



206 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of whole forests — for everything with him was on a 
magnificent scale — and where he might indulge the 
kindly feelings of his nature in his benevolent offices 
to a numerous and dependant tenantry. The few 
acres of the original purchase now swelled into 
hundreds, and, for aught we know, thousands ; for 
one tract alone we find incidentally noticed as cost- 
ing thirty thousand pounds. "It rounds off* the 
property so handsomely," he says, in one of his let- 
ters. There was^always a corner to " round off!" 
The mansion, in the mean time, from a simple cot- 
tage ornee, was amplified into the dimensions almost, 
as well as the bizarre proportions, of some old feu- 
dal castle. The furniture and decorations were of 
the costliest kind : the wainscots of oak and cedar ; 
the floors tesselated with marbles, or woods of dif- 
ferent dyes ; the ceilings fretted and carved with 
the delicate tracery of a Gothic abbey ; the storied 
windows blazoned with the richly-coloured insignia 
of heraldry, the walls garnished with time-honoured 
trophies, or curious specimens of art, or volumes 
sumptuously bound — in short, with all that luxury 
could demand or ingenuity devise ; while a copious 
reservoir of gas supplied every corner of the man- 
sion with such fountains of light as must have puz- 
zled the genius of the lamp to provide for the less 
fortunate Aladdin. 

Scott's exchequer must have been seriously taxed 
in another form by the crowds of visiters whom he 
entertained under his hospitable roof There was 
scarcely a person of note, or, to say truth, not of 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 203 

note, who visited that country without paying his 
respects to the Lion of Scotland. Lockhart reck- 
ons up a full sixth of the British peerage, who had 
been there within his recollection ; and Captain Hall, 
in his amusing Notes, remarks, that it was not un- 
usual for a dozen or more coach loads to find their 
way into his grounds in the course of the day, most 
of whom found or forced an entrance into the man- 
sion. Such was the heavy tax paid by his celeb- 
rity, and, we may add, his good-nature ; for, if the 
one had been a whit less than the other, he could 
never have tolerated such a nuisance. 

The cost of his correspondence gives one no light 
idea of the demands made on his time, as well as 
purse, in another form. His postage for letters, in- 
dependently of franks, by which a large portion of it 
was covered, amounted to a hundred and fifty pounds, 
it seems, in the course of the year. In this, indeed, 
should be included ten pounds for a pair of unfortu- 
nate Cherokee Lovers, sent all the way from our own 
happy land in order to be god-fathered by Sir Wal- 
ter on the London boards. Perhaps the smart-money 
he had to pay on this interesting occasion had its in- 
fluence in mixing up rather more acid than was nat- 
ural to him in his judgments of our countrymen. At 
all events, the Yankees find little favour on the few 
occasions on which he has glanced at them in his 
correspondence. " I am not at all surprised," he 
says, in a letter to Miss Edgeworth, "I am not at all 
surprised at what you say of the Yankees. They 
are a people possessed of very considerable energy, 



204 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

quickened and brought into eager action by an hon- 
ourable love of their country and pride in their in- 
stitutions ; but they are as yet rude in their ideas of 
social intercourse, and totally ignorant, speaking gen- 
erally, of all the art of good-breeding, which consists 
chiefly in a postponement of one's own petty wishes 
or comforts to those of others. By rude questions 
and observations, an absolute disrespect to other peo- 
ple's feehngs, and a ready indulgence of their own, 
they make one feverish in their company, though 
perhaps you may be ashamed to confess the reason. 
But this will wear off, and is already wearing away. 
Men, when they have once got benches, will soon 
fall into the use of cushions. They are advancing 
in the lists of our literature, and they will not be 
long deficient in the petite morale, especially as they 
have, like ourselves, the rage for travelhng." On 
another occasion, he does, indeed, admit having met 
with, in the course of his life, " four or five w^ell-let- 
tered Americans, ardent in pursuit of knowledge, 
and free from the ignorance and forward presump- 
tion which distinguish many of their countrymen." 
This seems hard measure, but perhaps we should 
find it difficult, among the many who have visited 
this country, to recollect as great a number of Eng- 
Ushmen — ^and Scotchmen to boot — entitled to a high- 
er degree of commendation. It can hardly be that 
the well-informed and well-bred men of both coun- 
tries make a point of staying at home ; so we sup- 
pose we must look for the solution of the matter in 
the existence of some disagreeable ingredient, com- 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 205 

mon to the characters of both nations, sprouting, as 
they do, from a common stock, which remains latent 
at home, and is never fully disclosed till they get into 
a foreign climate. But as this problem seems preg- 
nant with philosophical, physiological, and, for aught 
we know, psychological matter, we have not courage 
for it here, but recommend the solution to Miss Mar- 
tineau, to whom it will afford a very good title for a 
new chapter in her next edition. The strictures we 
have quoted, however, to speak more seriously, are 
worth attending to, coming as they do from a shrewd 
observer, and one whose judgments, though here 
somewhat coloured, no doubt, by political prejudice, 
are, in the main, distinguished by a sound and liberal 
philanthropy. But were he ten times an enemy, we 
would say, " Fas est ab hoste doceri." 

With the splendid picture of the baronial resi- 
dence at Abbotsford, Mr. Lockhart closes all that at 
this present writing we have received of his delight- 
ful work in this country ; and in the last sentence 
the melancholy sound of " the muffled drum" gives 
ominous warning of what we are to expect in the 
sixth and concluding volume. In the dearth of more 
authentic information, we will piece out our sketch 
with a few facts gleaned from the somewhat meager 
bill of fare — meager by comparison with the rich 
banquet of the true Amphitryon — afforded by the 
" Recollections" of Mr. Robert Pierce Gillies. 

The unbounded popularity of the Waverley Nov- 
els led to still more extravagant anticipations on the 
part both of the publishers and author. Some hints 



206 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of a falling off, though but slightly, in the public fa- 
vour, were unheeded by both parties, though, to say 
truth, the exact state of things was never disclosed 
to Scott, it being Ballantyne's notion that it would 
prove a damper, and that the true course was "to 
press on more sail as the wind lulled." In these 
sanguine calculations, not only enormous sums, or, 
to speak correctly, hills, were given for what had been 
written, but the author's draughts, to the amount of 
many thousand pounds, were accepted by Constable 
in favour of works, the very embryos of which lay, 
not only unformed, but unimagined in the womb of 
time. In return for this singular accommodation, 
Scott was induced to endorse the draughts of his 
publisher, and in this way an amount of liabilities 
was incurred, which, considering the character of the 
house and its transactions, it is altogether inexpli- 
cable that a person in the independent position of 
Sir Walter Scott should have subjected himself to 
for a moment. He seems to have had entire confi- 
dence in the stability of the firm, a confidence to 
which it seems, from Mr. Gillies's account, not to 
have been entitled from the first moment of his con- 
nexion with it. The great reputation of the house, 
however, the success and magnitude of some of its 
transactions, especially the publication of these nov- 
els, gave it a large credit, which enabled it to go 
forward with a great show of prosperity in ordinary 
times, and veiled its tottering state probably from 
Constable's own eyes. It is but the tale of yester- 
day. The case of Constable and Co. is, unhappily. 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 207 

a very familiar one to us. But when the hurricane 
of 1825 came on, it swept away all those buildings 
that were not founded on a rock, and those of 
Messrs. Constable, among others, soon became lit- 
erally mere castles in the air — in plain English, the 
firm stopped payment. The assets were very tri- 
fling in comparison with the debts ; and Sir Walter 
Scott was found on their paper to the frightful 
amount of one hundred thousand pounds ! 

His conduct on the occasion was precisely what 
w^as to have been anticipated from one who had de- 
clared on a similar, though much less appalhng con- 
juncture, "I am always ready to make any sacri- 
fices to do justice to my engagements, and would 
rather sell anything, or everything, than be less 
than a true man to the world." He put up his 
house and furniture in town at auction, delivered 
over his personal effects at Abbotsford, his plate, 
books, furniture, &c., to be held in trust for his cred- 
itors (the estate itself had been recently secured to 
his son on occasion of his marriage), and bound 
himself to discharge a certain amount annually of 
the liabilities of the insolvent firm. He then, with 
his characteristic energy, set about the performance 
of his Herculean task. He took lodgings in a third- 
rate house in St. David's-street, saw but little com- 
pany, abridged the hours usually devoted to his meals 
and his family, gave up his ordinary exercise, and, in 
short, adopted the severe habits of a regular Grub- 
street stipendiary. 

" For many years," he said to Mr. Gilhes, " I have 



208 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

been accustomed to hard work, because I found it a 
pleasure ; now, with all due respect for FalstafF's 
principle, 'nothing on compulsion,' I certainly will 
not shrink from work because it has become neces- 
sary." 

One of his first tasks was his "Life of Bonaparte," 
achieved in the space of thirteen months. For this 
he received fourteen thousand pounds, about eleven 
hundred per month — not a bad bargain either, as it 
proved, for the publishers. The first two volumes 
of the nine which make up the English edition were 
a rifacimento of what he had before compiled for the 
" Annual Register." With every allowance for the 
inaccuracies, and the excessive expansion incident to 
such a flashing rapidity of execution, the work, ta- 
king into view the broad range of its topics, its shrewd 
and sagacious reflections, and the free, bold, and pic- 
turesque colouring of its narration, and, above all, 
considering the hrief time in ichich it ivas written, is 
indisputably one of the most remarkable monuments 
of genius and industry — perhaps the most remarka- 
ble ever recorded. 

Scott's celebrity made everything that fell from 
him, however trifling — the dewdrops from the lion's 
mane — of value. But none of the many adventures 
he embarked in, or, rather, set afloat, proved so prof- 
itable as the republication of his novels, with his notes 
and iflustrations. As he felt his own strength in the 
increasing success of his labours, he appears to have 
relaxed somewhat from them, and to have again re- 
sumed somewhat of his ancient habits, and, in a mit- 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 209 

igated degree, his ancient hospitality. But still his 
exertions were too severe, and pressed heavily on 
the springs of his health, already deprived by age of 
their former elasticity and vigour. At length, in 
1831, he was overtaken by one of those terrible 
shocks of paralysis which seem to have been con- 
stitutional in his family, but which, with more pre- 
caution, and under happier auspices, might, doubtless, 
have been postponed, if not wholly averted. At 
this time he had, in the short space of little more 
than five years, by his sacrifices and efforts, dischar- 
ged about two thirds of the debt for which he was 
responsible : an astonishing result, wholly unparal- 
leled in the history of letters ! There is something 
inexpressibly painful in this spectacle of a generous 
heart thus courageously contending with fortune, 
bearing up against the tide with unconquerable spir- 
it, and finally overwhelmed by it just within reach of 
shore. 

The rest of his story is one of humiliation and 
sorrow. He was induced to take a voyage to the 
Continent to try the effect of a more genial cUmate. 
Under the sunny sky of Italy, he seemed to gather 
new strength for a while ; but his eye fell with in- 
difference on the venerable monuments which, in 
better days, would have kindled all his enthusiasm. 
The invalid sighed for his own home at Abbotsford. 
The heat of the weather and the fatigue of rapid 
travel brought on another shock, which reduced him 
to a state of deplorable imbecility. In this condition 
he returned to his own halls, where the sight of early 

Dd 



210 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

friends, and of the beautiful scenery, the creation, as 
it were, of his own hands, seemed to impart a gleam 
of melancholy satisfaction, which soon, however, sunk 
into insensibihty. To his present situation might 
well be applied the exquisite verses which he indi- 
ted on another melancholy occasion : 

" Yet not the landscape to mine eye 

Bears those bright hues that once it bore ; 
Though Evening, with her richest dye, 
Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore. 

" With listless look along the plain 
I see Tweed's silver current glide, 
And coldly mark the holy fane 
Of Melrose rise in ruined pride. 

" The quiet lake, the balmy air, 

The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, 
Are they still such as once they were, 
Or is the dreary change in me ?' 

Providence, in its mercy, did not suffer the shatter- 
ed frame long to outlive the glorious spirit which had 
informed it. He breathed his last on the 21st of 
September, 1832. His remains were deposited, as 
he had always desired, in the hoary abbey of Dry- 
burgh, and the pilgrim from many a distant clime 
shall repair to the consecrated spot so long as the 
reverence for exalted genius and worth shall survive 
in the human heart. 

This sketch, brief as we could make it, of the lit- 
erary history of Sir Walter Scott, has extended so far 
as to leave but little space for — what Lockhart's vol- 
umes afford ample materials for — his personal char- 
acter. Take it for all and all, it is not too much to 
say that this character is probably the most remark- 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 211 

able on record. There is no man of historical ce- 
lebrity that we now recall, who combined, in so em- 
inent a degree, the highest qualities of the moral, 
the intellectaal, and the physical. He united in his 
own character what hitherto had been found incom- 
patible. Though a poet, and Uving in an ideal 
world, he was an exact, methodical man of busi- 
ness ; though achieving with the most wonderful fa- 
cihty of genius, he was patient and laborious ; a 
mousing antiquarian, yet with the most active in- 
terest in the present, and w^hatever was going on 
around him; with a strong turn for a roving life 
and military adventure, he was yet chained to his 
desk more hours, at some periods of his life, than a 
monkish recluse; a man with a heart as capacious 
as his head ; a Tory, brim full of Jaeobitism, yet 
full of sympathy and unaffected familiarity with all 
classes, even the humblest; a successful author, with- 
out pedantry and without conceit ; one, indeed, at 
the head of the repubhc of letters, and yet with a 
lower estimate of letters, as compared with other in- 
tellectual pursuits, than was ever hazarded before. 

The first quality of his character, or, rather, that 
which forms the basis of it, as of all great characters, 
was his energy. We see it, in his early youth, tri- 
umphing over the impediments of nature, and, in 
spite of lameness, making him conspicuous in every 
sort of athletic exercise — clambering up dizzy pre- 
cipices, wading through treacherous fords, and per- 
forming feats of pedestrianism that make one's joints 
ache to read of. As he advanced in life, we see the 



212 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, 

same force of purpose turned to higher objects. A 
striking example occurs in his organization of the 
journals and the publishing house in opposition to 
Constable. In what Herculean drudgery did not 
this latter business, in which he undertook to supply 
matter for the nimble press of Ballantyne, involve 
him ! while, in addition to his own concerns, he had 
to drag along by his solitary momentum a score of 
heavier undertakings, that led Lockhart to compare 
him to a steam-engine, with a train of coal wagons 
hitched to it. " Yes," said Scott, laughing, and ma- 
king a crashing cut with his axe (for they were fell- 
ing larches), " and there was a cursed lot of dung 
carts too." 

We see the same powerful energies triumphing 
over disease at a later period, when nothing but a 
resolution to get the better of it enabled him to do 
so. "Be assured," he remarked to Mr. Gillies, "that 
if pain could have prevented my application to lit- 
erary labour, not a page of Ivanhoe would have 
been written. Now if I had given way to mere 
feelings, and ceased to work, it is a question whether 
the disorder might not have taken a deeper root, and 
become incurable." But the most extraordinary in- 
stance of this trait is the readiness with which he 
assumed and the spirit with which he carried through, 
till his mental strength broke down under it, the gi- 
gantic task imposed on him by the failure of Constable. 

It mattered little what the nature of the task was, 
whether it were organizing an opposition to a poht- 
ical faction, or a troop of cavalry to resist invasion, 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 213 

or a medley of wild Highlanders or Edinburgh cock- 
neys to make up a royal puppet-show — a loyal cel- 
ebration — for " His Most Sacred Majesty" — he was 
the master-spirit that gave the cue to the whole 
drarnatis personce. This potent impulse showed it- 
self in the thoroughness with which he prescribed, 
not merely the general orders, but the execution of 
the minutest details, in his own person. Thus all 
around him was the creation, as it were, of his in- 
dividual exertion. His lands waved with forests 
planted with his own hands, and, in process of time, 
cleared by his own hands. He did not lay the stones 
in mortar, exactly, for his whimsical castle, but he 
seems to have superintended the operation from the 
foundation to the battlements. The antique relics, the 
curious works of art, the hangings and furniture, even., 
with which his halls were decorated, were specially 
contrived or selected by him ; and, to read his letters 
at this time to his friend Terry, one might fancy 
himself perusing the correspondence of an uphol- 
sterer, so exact and technical is he in his instructions. 
We say this not in disparagement of his great qual- 
ities. It is only the more extraordinary ; for, while 
he stooped to such trifles, he was equally thorough 
in matters of the highest moment. It was a trait of 
character. 

Another quality, which, like the last, seems to have 
given the tone to his character, was his social or be- 
nevolent feelings. His heart was an unfailing fount- 
ain, which not merely the distresses, but the joys of 
his fellow-creatures made to flow like water. In 



214 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

earlj life, and possibly sometimes in later, high spir- 
its and a vigorous constitution led him occasionally 
to carry his social propensities into convivial excess; 
but he never was in danger of the habitual excess 
to which a vulgar mind — and sometimes, alas ! one 
more finely tuned — abandons itself With all his 
conviviahty, it was not the sensual reUsh, but the so- 
cial, which acted on him. He was neither gourme 
nor gourmand; but his social meetings were endear- 
ed to him by the free interchange of kindly feehngs 
with his friends. La Bruyere says (and it is odd 
he should have found it out in Louis the Four- 
teenth's court), " the heart has more to do than the 
head with the pleasures, or, rather, promoting the 
pleasures of society ;" " Un homme est d'un meilleur 
commerce dans la societe par le coeur que par I'es- 
prit." If report — the report of travellers — be true, 
we Americans, at least the New-Englanders, are too 
much perplexed with the cares and crosses of life to 
afford many genuine specimens of this honhommie. 
However this may be, we all, doubtless, know some 
such character, whose shining face, the index of a 
cordial heart, radiant with beneficent pleasure, diffu- 
ses its own exhilarating glow wherever it appears. 
Rarely, indeed, is this precious quality found united 
with the most exalted intellect. Whether it be that 
Nature, chary of her gifts, does not care to shower 
too many of them on one head ; or that the public 
admiration has led the man of intellect to set too 
high a value on himself, or at least his own pursuits, 
to take an interest in the inferior concerns of others; 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 215 

or that the fear of compromising his dignity puts him 
" on points" with those who approach him ; or 
whether, in truth, the very magnitude of his own 
reputation throws a freezing shadow over us Httle 
people in his neigiibourhood — whatever be the 
cause, it is too true that the highest powers of mind 
are very often deficient in the only one which can 
make the rest of much worth in society — the power 
of pleasing. 

Scott was not one of these httle great. His was 
not one of those dark-lantern visages which concen- 
trate all their light on their own p^th, and are black 
as midnight to all about them. He had a ready 
sympathy, a word of contagious kindness, or cordial 
greeting, for all. His manners, too, were of a kind 
to dispel the icy reserve and awe which his great 
name was calculated to inspire. His frank address 
was a sort of open sesame to every heart. He did 
not deal in sneers, the poisoned weapons which 
come not from the head, as the man who launches 
them is apt to think, but from an acid heart, or, per- 
haps, an acid stomach, a very common laboratory of 
such small artillery. Neither did Scott amuse the 
company with parliamentary harangues or meta- 
physical disquisitions. His conversation was of the 
narrative kind, not formal, but as casually suggested 
by some passing circumstance or topic, and thrown 
in by way of illustration. He did not repeat him- 
self, however, but continued to give his anecdotes 
such variations, by rigging them out in a new " cock- 
ed hat and walking-cane," as he called it, that they 



216 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

never tired like the thrice-told tale of a chronic ra- 
conteur. He allowed others, too, to take their turn, 
and thought with the Dean of St. Patrick's : 

" Carve to all, but just enough, 
Let them neither starve nor stuff: 
And, that you may have your due, 
Let your neighbours carve for you." 

He relished a good joke, from whatever quarter it 
came, and w^as not over-dainty in his manner of 
testifying his satisfaction. " In the full tide of mirth, 
he did indeed laugh the heart's laugh," says Mr. 
Adolphus. " Give me an honest laugher," said Scott 
himself, on another occasion, when a buckram man 
of fashion had been paying him a visit at Abbots- 
ford. His manners, free from affectation or artifice 
of any sort, exhibited the spontaneous movements 
of a kind disposition, subject to those rules of good 
breeding which Nature herself might have dictated. 
In this way he answered his own purpose admira- 
bly as a painter of character, by putting every man 
in good humour with himself, in the same manner 
as a cunning portrait-painter amuses his sitters with 
such store of fun and anecdote as may throw them 
off their guard, and call out the happiest expressions 
of their countenances. 

Scott, in his wide range of friends and compan- 
ions, does not seem to have been over-fastidious. 
In the instance of John Ballantyne, it has exposed 
him to some censure. In truth, a more worthless 
fellow never hung on the skirts of a great man ; for 
he did not take the trouble to throw a decent veil 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 217 

over the grossest excesses. Bat then he had been 
the schoolboy friend of Scott ; had grown up with 
him in a sort of dependance — a relation which be- 
gets a kindly feeling in the party that confers the 
benefits, at least. How strong it was in him may 
be inferred from his remark at his funeral. " I feel," 
said Scott, mournfully, as the solemnity was con- 
cluded, " I feel as if there would be less sunshine for 
me from this day forth." It must be admitted, how^- 
ever, that his intimacy with little Rigdumfunnidos, 
whatever apology it may find in Scott's heart, was 
not very creditable to his taste. 

But the benevolent principle showed itself not 
merely in words, but in the more substantial form 
of actions. How many are the cases recorded of 
indigent merit, which he drew from obscurity, and 
almost warmed into life by his own generous and 
most dehcate patronage ! Such were the cases, 
among others, of Leyden, Weber, Hogg. How 
often and how cheerfully did he supply such htera- 
ry contributions as were solicited by his friends — 
and they taxed him pretty liberally — amid all the 
pressure of business, and at the height of his fame, 
when his hours were golden hours to him ! In the 
more vulgar and easier forms of charity, he did not 
stint his hand, though, instead of direct assistance, 
he preferred to enable others to assist themselves ; 
m this way fortifying their good habits, and reliev- 
ing them from the sense of personal degradation. 

But the place where his benevolent impulses 
found their proper theatre for expansion was his 

E E 



218 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

own home; surrounded bj a happy family, and dis- 
pensing all the hospitaUties of a great feudal propri- 
etor. " There are many good things in life," he 
says, in one of his letters, "whatever satirists and 
misanthropes may say to the contrary ; but proba- 
bly the best of all, next to a conscience void of of- 
fence (without which, by-the-by, they can hardly 
exist), are the quiet exercise and enjoyment of the 
social feelings, in which we are at once happy our- 
selves, and the cause of happiness to them who are 
dearest to us." Every page of the work, almost, 
shows us how intimately he blended himself with 
the pleasures and the pursuits of his own family, 
watched over the education of his children, shared 
in their rides, their rambles, and sports, losing no op- 
portunity of kindling in their young minds a love of 
virtue, and honourable principles of action. He de- 
Ughted, too, to collect his tenantry around him, mul- 
tiplying holydays, when young and old might come 
together under his roof-tree, when the jolly punch 
was hberally dispensed by himself and his wife 
among the elder people, and the Hogmanay cakes 
and pennies were distributed among the young ones; 
while his own children mingled in the endless reels 
and hornpipes on the earthen floor, and the laird 
himself, mixing in the groups of merry faces, had 
" his private joke for every old wife or 'gausie carle,' 
his arch compliment for the ear of every bonny lass, 
and his hand and his blessing for the head of every 
little Eppie Daidle from Abbotstown or Broomylees." 
" Sir Walter," said one of his old retainers, " speaks 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 219 

to every man as if he were his blood relation." No 
wonder that they should have returned this feeUng 
with something warmer than blood relations usually 
do. Mr. GilUes tells an anecdote of the Ettrick 
Shepherd, showing how deep a root such feehngs, 
notwithstanding his rather odd way of expressing 
them, sometimes, had taken in his honest nature. 
"Mr. James Ballantyne, walking home with him 
one evening from Scott's, where, by-the-by, Hogg 
had gone uninvited, happened to observe, * I do not 
at all hke this illness of Scott's. I have often seen 
him look jaded of late, and am afraid it is serious.' 
' Hand your tongue, or I'll gar you measure your 
length on the pavement !' replied Hogg. * You 
fause, down-hearted loon that you are ; ye daur to 
speak as if Scott were on his death-bed ! It cannot 
be — it must not be ! I will not suffer you to speak 
that gait.' The sentiment was like that of Uncle 
Toby at the bedside of Le Fevre; and, at these 
words, the Shepherd's voice became suppressed with 
emotion." 

But Scott's sympathies were not confined to his 
species , and if he treated them like blood relations, 
he treated his brute followers like personal friends. 
Every one remembers old Maida and faithfijl Camp, 
the " dear old friend," whose loss cost him a dinner. 
Mr. GiUies tells us that he w^ent into his study on 
one occasion, when he was winding off his " Vision 
of Don Roderick." " 'Look here,' said the poet, ' I 
have just begun to copy over the rhymes that you 
heard to-day and applauded so much. Return to 



220 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

supper if you can ; only don't be late, as you per- 
ceive we keep early hours, and Wallace will not suf- 
fer me to rest after si^ in the morning. Come, good 
dog, and help the poet/ At this hint, Wallace seatr 
ed himself upright on a chair next his master, who 
offered him a newspaper, which he directly seized, 
looking very wise, and holding it firmly and content- 
edly in his mouth. Scott looked at him with great 
satisfaction, for he was excessively fond of dogs. 
* Very well,' said he ; ' now we shall get on.' And so 
I left them abruptly, knowing that my ' absence 
would be the best company.' " This fellowship ex- 
tended much farther than to his canine followers, of 
which, including hounds, terriers, mastiffs, and mon- 
grels, he had certainly a goodly assortment. We 
find, also. Grimalkin installed in a responsible post in 
the library, and out of doors pet hens, pet donkeys, 
and — tell it not in Judaea— a pet pig ! 

Scott's sensibilities, though easily moved and 
widely diffused, were warm and sincere. None 
shared more cordially in the troubles of his friends ; 
but on all such occasions, with a true manly feeling, 
he thought less of mere sympathy than of the most 
effectual way for mitigating their sorrows. After a 
touching allusion in one of his epistles to his dear 
friend Erskine's death, he concludes, *' I must turn 
to and see what can be done about getting some pen- 
sion for his daughters." In another passage, which 
may remind one of some of the exquisite touches in 
Jeremy Taylor, he indulges in the following beauti- 
ful strain of philosophy : " The last three or four 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 221 

years have swept away more than half the friends 
with whom I Hved in habits of great intimacy. So 
it must be with us 

♦ When ance life's day draws near the gloamin',' 

and yet we proceed with our plantations and plans 
as if any tree but the sad cypress would accompany 
us to the grave, where our friends have gone before 
us. It is the way of the world, however, and must 
be so ; otherwise life would be spent in unavailing 
mourning for those whom we have lost. It is better 
to enjoy the society of those who remain to us." 
His well-disciplined heart seems to have confessed 
the influence of this philosophy in his most ordinary 
relations. " I can't help it," was a favourite maxim 
of his, " and therefore will not think about it ; for 
that, at least, I can help." 

Among his admirable qualities must not be omit- 
ted a certain worldly sagacity or shrewdness, which 
is expressed as strongly as any individual trait can 
be in some of his portraits, especially in the excellent 
one of him by LesHe. Indeed, his countenance 
would seem to exhibit, ordinarily, much more of 
Dandie Dinmont's benevolent shrewdness than of 
the eye glancing from earth to heaven, which in 
fancy we assign to the poet, and which, in some 
moods, must have been his. This trait may be 
readily discerned in his business transactions, which 
he managed with perfect knowledge of character as 
well as of his own rights. No one knew better than 
he the market value of an article ; and, though he 



222 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

underrated his literary wares as to their mere Hter- 
arj rank, he set as high a money value on them, and 
made as sharp a bargain as any of the trade could 
have done. In his business concerns, indeed, he 
managed rather too much, or, to speak more cor- 
rectly, was too fond of mixing up mystery in his 
transactions, which, like most mysteries, proved of 
little service to their author. Scott's correspond- 
ence, especially with his son, affords obvious exam- 
ples of shrewdness, in the advice he gives as to his 
deportment in the novel situations and society into 
which the young cornet was thrown. Occasionally, 
in the cautious hints about etiquette and social ob- 
servances, we may be reminded of that ancient 
" arbiter elegantiarum,'' Lord Chesterfield, though 
it must be confessed there is throughout a high 
moral tone, which the noble lord did not very scru- 
pulously affect. 

Another feature in Scott's character was his loy- 
alty, which some people would extend into a more 
general deference to rank not royal. We do cer- 
tainly meet with a tone of deference, occasionally, 
to the privileged orders (or, rather, privileged per- 
sons, as the king, or his own chief, for to the mass 
of stars and garters he showed no such respect), 
which falls rather unpleasantly on the ear of a Re- 
pubhcan. But, independently of the feehngs which 
rightfully belonged to him as the subject of a mon- 
archy, and without which he must have been a false- 
hearted subject, his own were heightened by a poet- 
ical colouring, that mingled in his mind even with 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 223 

much more vulgar relations of life. At the opening 
of the regalia in Holyrood House, when the honest 
burgomaster deposited the crown on the head of one 
of the young ladies present, the good man probably 
saw nothing more in the dingy diadem than we 
should have seen — a headpiece for a set of men no 
better than himself, and, if the old adage of a " dead 
lion" holds true, not quite so good. But to Scott's 
imagination other views were unfolded. "A thou- 
sand years their cloudy wings expanded" around 
him, and, in the dim visions of distant times, he be- 
held the venerable line of monarchs who had swayed 
the councils of his country in peace and led her ar- 
mies in battle. The " golden round" became in his 
eye the symbol of his nation's glory ; and as he heav- 
ed a heavy oath from his heart, he left the room in 
agitation, from which he did not speedily recover. 
There was not a spice of affectation in this — for who 
ever accused Scott of affectation ? — but there was a 
good deal of poetry, the poetry of sentiment. 

We have said that this feeling mingled in the 
more common concerns of his life. His cranium, 
indeed, to judge from his busts, must have exhibited 
a strong development of the organ of veneration. He 
regarded with reverence everything connected with 
antiquity. His establishment was on the feudal 
scale ; his house was fashioned more after the feudal 
ages than his own ; and even in the ultimate distri- 
bution of his fortune, although the circumstance of 
having made it himself relieved him from any legal 
necessity of contravening the suggestions of natural 



224 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

justice, he showed such attachment to the old aristo- 
cratic usage as to settle nearly the whole of it on his 
eldest son. 

The influence of this poetic sentiment is discern- 
ible in his most trifling acts, in his tastes, his love of 
the arts, his social habits. His museum, house, and 
grounds were adorned with relics, curious not so 
much from their workmanship as their historic asso- 
ciations. It was the ancient fountain from Edin- 
burgh, the Tolbooth lintels, the blunderbuss and 
spleughan of Rob Roy, the drinking-cup of Prince 
Charlie, or the like. It was the same in the arts. 
The tunes he loved were not the refined and com- 
plex melodies of Italy, but the simple notes of his 
native minstrelsy, from the bagpipe of John of Skye, 
or from the harp of his own lovely and accomplish- 
ed daughter. So, also, in painting. It was not the 
masterly designs of the great Flemish and Italian 
schools that adorned his walls, but some portrait of 
Claverhouse, or of dueen Mary, or of "glorious old 
John." In architecture we see the same spirit in 
the singular " romance of stone and lime," which 
may be said to have been his own device, down to 
the minutest details of its finishing. We see it again 
in the joyous celebrations of his feudal tenantry, the 
good old festivals, the Hogmanay, the Kirn, &c., 
long fallen into desuetude, when the old Highland 
piper sounded the same wild pibroch that had so 
often summoned the clans together, for war or for 
wassail, among the fastnesses of the mountains. To 
the same source, in fine, may be traced the feelings 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 225 

of superstition which seemed to hover round Scott's 
mind Hke some " strange, mysterious dream," giving 
a romantic colouring to his conversation and his 
writings, but rarely^ if ever, influencing his actions. 
It was a poetic sentiment. 

Scott was a Tory to the backbone. Had he 
come into the world half a century sooner, he 
would, no doubt, have made a figure under the ban- 
ner of the Pretender. He was at no great pains to 
disguise his political creed ; witness his jolly drink- 
ing-song on the acquittal of Lord Melville. This 
was verse ; but his prose is not much more qualified. 
" As for Whiggery in general," he says, in one of 
his letters, " I can only say that, as no man can be 
said to be utterly overset until his rump has been 
higher than his head, so I cannot read in history of 
any free state which has been brought to slavery 
until the rascal and uninstructed populace had had 
their short hour of anarchical government, which 
naturally leads to the stern repose of military des- 
potism With these convictions, I am very jeal- 
ous of Whiggery under all modifications, and I must 
say my acquaintance with the total want of principle 
in some of its warmest professors does not tend to 
recommend it." With all this, however, his Toryism 
was not, practically, of that sort which blunts a man's 
sensibilities for those who are not of the same por- 
celain clay with himself No man. Whig or Radical, 
ever had less of this pretension, or treated his infe- 
riors with greater kindness, and even famiharity ; a 
circumstance noticed by every visiter at his liospi- 

Ff 



^ 



226 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

table mansion who saw him strolling round his 
grounds, taking his pinch of snufF out of the mull of 
some " gray-haired old hedger," or leaning on honest 
Tom Purdie's shoulder, and taking sweet counsel as 
to the right method of thinning a plantation. But, 
with all this familiarity, no man was better served 
by his domestics. It was the service of love, the 
only service that power cannot command and money 
cannot buy. 

Akin to the feelings of which we have been speak- 
ing was the ti'uly chivalrous sense of honour which 
stamped his whole conduct. We do not mean that 
Hotspur honour which is roused only by the drum 
and fife — though he says of himself, " I like the sound 
of a drum as well as Uncle Toby ever did" — but 
that honour which is deep-seated in the heart of ev- 
ery true gentleman, shrinking with sensitive delica- 
cy from the least stain, or imputation of a stain, on 
his faith. " If we lose everything else," writes he, on 
a trying occasion to a friend who was not so nice in 
this particular, " we will at least keep our honour un- 
blemished." It reminds one of the pithy epistle of a 
kindred chivalrous spirit, Francis the First, to his 
mother, from the unlucky field of Pavia : " Tout est 
perdu, fors I'honneur." Scott's latter years furnished 
a noble commentary on the sincerity of his manly 
principles. 

Little is said directly of his religious sentiments in 
the biography. They seem to have harmonized well 
with his political. He was a member of the English 
Church, a stanch champion of estabhshed forms, and 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 227 

a sturdy enemy to everything that savoured of the 
sharp tang of Puritanism. On this ground, indeed, 
the youthful Samson used to wrestle manfully with 
worthy Dominie Mitchell, who, no doubt, furnished 
many a screed of doctrine for the Rev. Peter Pound- 
text, Master Nehemiah Holdenough, and other hghts 
of the Covenant. Scott was no friend to cant under 
any form. But, whatever were his speculative opin- 
ions, in practice his heart overflowed with that 
charity which is the life-spring of our religion ; and 
whenever he takes occasion to allude to the subject 
directly, he testifies a deep reverence for the truths 
of revelation, as well as for its Divine original. 

Whatever estimate be formed of Scott's moral 
qualities, his intellectual were of a kind which well 
entitled him to the epithet conferred on Lope de 
Vega, "monstruo de naturaleza" (a miracle of na- 
ture). His mind scarcely seemed to be subjected 
to the same laws that control the rest of his species. 
His memory, as is usual, was the first of his powers 
fully developed. While an urchin at school, he 
could repeat whole cantos, he says, of Ossian and 
of Spenser. In riper years we are constantly meet- 
ing with similar feats of his achievement. Thus, 
on one occasion, he repeated the whole of a poem 
in some penny magazine, incidentally alluded to, 
which he had not seen since he was a schoolboy. 
On another, when the Ettrick Shepherd was trying 
ineffectually to fish up from his own recollections 
some scraps of a ballad he had himself manufactured 
years before, Scott called to him, "Take your pencil, 



228 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Jemmy, and I will tell it to you, word for word ;" 
and he accordingly did so. But it is needless to 
multiply examples of feats so startling as to look 
almost like the tricks of a conjuror. 

What is most extraordinary is, that while he ac- 
quired with such facility, that the bare perusal, or 
the repetition of a thing once to him, was sufficient, 
he yet retained it with the greatest pertinacity. 
Other men's memories are so much jostled in the 
rough and tumble of life, that most of the facts get 
sifted out nearly as fast as they are put in ; so that 
we are in the same dilemma with those unlucky 
daughters of Danaus, of schoolboy memory, obliged 
to spend the greater part of the time in replenishing. 
But Scott's memory seemed to be hermetically seal- 
ed, suffering nothing once fairly in to leak out again. 
This was of immense service to him when he took 
up the business of authorship, as his whole multifa- 
rious stock of facts, whether from books or observa- 
tion, became, in truth, his stock in trade, ready fur- 
nished to his hands. This may explain in part — 
though it is not less marvellous — the cause of his 
rapid execution of works, often replete with rare 
and curious information. The labour, the prepara- 
tion, had been already completed. His whole life 
had been a business of preparation. When he ven- 
tured, as in the case of " Rokeby" and of " Quentin 
Durward," on ground with which he had not been 
familiar, we see how industriously he set about new 
acquisitions. 

In most of the prodigies of memory which we 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 229 

have ever known, the overgrowth of that faculty 
seems to have been attained at the expense of all 
the others ; but m Scott, the directly opposite power 
of the imagination, the inventive power, was equally 
strongly developed, and at the same early age ; for 
we find him renowned for story- craft while at 
school. How many a dehghtful fiction, warm with 
the flush of ingenuous youth, did he not throw away 
on the ears of thoughtless childhood, which, had 
they been duly registered, might now have amused 
children of a larger growth ! We have seen Scott's 
genius in its prime and its decay. The frohc graces 
of childhood are alone wanting. 

The facility with which he threw his ideas into 
language was also remarked very early. One of his 
first ballads, and a long one, was dashed off at the 
dinner-table. His " Lay" was written at the rate 
of a canto a week. " Waverley," or, rather, the last 
two volumes of it, cost the evenings of a summer 
month. Who that has ever read the account can 
forget the movements of that mysterious hand, as 
described by the tw^o students from the window of 
a neighbouring attic, throwing off sheet after sheet, 
with untiring rapidity, of the pages destined to im- 
mortality 1 Scott speaks pleasantly enough of this 
marvellous facihty in a letter to his friend Morritt : 
" When once I set my pen to the paper, it will walk 
fast enough. I am sometimes tempted to leave it 
alone, and see whether it will not write as well 
without the assistance of my head as with it. A 
hopeful prospect for the reader." 



230 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

As to the time and place of composition, he ap- 
pears to have been nearly indifferent. He possessed 
entire power of abstraction, and it mattered little 
whether he were nailed to his clerk's desk, under the 
drowsy eloquence of some long-winded barrister, or 
dashing his horse into the surf on Portobello sands, 
or rattling in a post-chaise, or amid the hum of guests 
in his overflowing halls at Abbotsford — it mattered 
not ; the same well-adjusted little packet, " nicely 
corded and sealed," was sure to be ready, at the 
regular time, for the Edinburgh mail. His own ac- 
count of his composition to a friend, who asked 
when he found time for it, is striking enough. " Oh," 
said Scott, " I lie simmering over things for an hour 
or so before I get up, and there's the time I am 
dressing to overhaul my half sleeping, half waking 
p-ojet de chapitre ; and when I get the paper before 
me, it commonly runs off pretty easily. Besides, I 
often take a doze in the plantations, and while Tom 
marks out a dike or a drain as I have directed, 
one's fancy may be running its ain riggs in some 
other world." Never did this sort of simmering 
produce such a splendid bill of fare. 

The quality of the material, under such circum- 
stances, is, in truth, the great miracle of the whole. 
The execution of so much work, as a mere feat of 
penmanship, would undoubtedly be very extraordi- 
nary, but as a mere scrivener's miracle, would be 
hardly worth recording. It is a sort of miracle that 
is every day performing under our own eyes, as it 
were, by Messrs. James, Bulwer, & Co., who, in all 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 231 

the various staples of " comedy, history, pastoral- 
comical, historical-pastoral," &c., supply their own 
market, and ours too, with all that can be wanted. 
In Spain, and in Italy also, we may find abundance 
of improvvisatori and improvvisatrici, who perform 
miracles of the same sort, in verse, too, in languages 
whose vowel terminations make it very easy for the 
thoughts to tumble into rhyme, without any malice 
prepense. Sir Stamford Raffles, in his account of 
Java, tells us of a splendid avenue of trees before his 
house, which in the course of a year shot up to the 
height of forty feet. But who shall compare the 
brief, transitory splendours of a fungus vegetation with 
the mighty monarch of the forest, sending his roots 
deep into the heart of the earth, and his branches, 
amid storm and sunshine, to the heavens ? And is 
not the latter the true emblem of Scott I For who 
can doubt that his prose creations, at least, will gath- 
er strength with time, living on through succeed- 
ing generations, even when the language in which 
they are written, like those of Greece and Rome, 
shall cease to be a living language ? 

The only writer deserving, in these respects, to 
be named with Scott, is Lope de Vega, who in his 
own day held as high a rank in the republic of let- 
ters as our great contemporary. The beautiful dra- 
mas which he threw off for the entertainment of the 
capital, and whose success drove Cervantes from the 
stage, outstripped the abilities of an amanuensis to 
copy. His intimate friend, Montalvan, one of the 
most popular and prolific authors of the time, tells 



232 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

US that he undertook with Lope once to supply the 
theatre with a comedy — in verse, and in three acts, 
as the Spanish dramas usually were — at a very short 
notice. In order to get through his half as soon as 
his partner, he rose by two in the morning, and at 
eleven had completed it ; an extraordinary feat, cer- 
tainly, since a play extended to between thirty and 
forty pages, of a hundred lines each. Walking into 
the garden, he found his brother poet pruning an 
orange-tree. " Well, how do you get on 1" said 
Montalvan. "Very well," answered Lope. "I rose 
betimes — at five ; and after I had got through, eat 
my breakfast ; since which I have written a letter of 
fifty triplets, and watered the whole of the garden, 
which has tired me a good deal." 

But a httle arithmetic will best show the compar- 
ative fertihty of Scott and Lope de Vega. It is so 
german to the present matter, that we shall make 
no apology for transcribing here some computations 
from our last July number ; and as few of our read- 
ers, we suspect, have the air-tight memory of Sir 
Walter, we doubt not that enough of it has escaped 
them by this time to excuse us from equipping it with 
one of those " cocked hats and walking-sticks" with 
which he furbished up an old story. 

"It is impossible to state the results of Lope de 
Vega's labours in any form that will not powerfully 
strike the imagination. Thus, he has left twenty- 
one milhon three hundred thousand verses in print, 
besides a mass of manuscript. He furnished the 
theatre, according to the statement of his intimate 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 233 

friend', Montalvan, with eighteen hundred regular 
plays, and four hundred autos or religious dramas — 
all acted. He composed, according to his own state- 
ment, more than one hundred comedies in the al- 
most incredible space of twenty-four hours each ; 
and a comedy averaged between two and three thou- 
sand verses, great part of them rhymed, and inter- 
spersed with sonnets, and other more difficult forms 
of versification. He lived seventy-two years ; and 
supposing him to have employed fifty of that period 
in composition, although he filled a variety of en- 
grossing vocations during that time, he must have 
averaged a play a week, to say nothing of twenty- 
one volumes, quarto, of miscellaneous works, inclu- 
ding five epics, written in his leisure moments, and 
all now in print ! 

" The only achievements we can recall in liter- 
ary history bearing any resemblance to, though fall- 
ing far short of this, are those of our illustrious con- 
temporary. Sir Walter Scott. The complete edition 
of his works, recently advertised by Murray, with 
the edition of two volumes of which Murray has 
not the copyright, probably contains ninety volumes, 
small octavo. [To these should farther be added a 
large supply of matter for the Edinburgh Annual 
Register, as well as other anonymous contributions.] 
Of these, forty-eight volumes of novels, and twenty- 
one of history and biography, were produced be- 
tween 1814 and 1831, or in seventeen years. These 
would give an average of four volumes a year, or 
one for every three months during the whole of that 

Gg 



234 BIOGRAPHICA.L AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

period; to which must be added twenty-one vol- 
umes of poetry and prose, previously pubhshed. The 
mere mechanical execution of so much work, both 
in his case and Lope de Vega's, would seem to be 
scarce possible in the limits assigned. Scott, too, 
was as variously occupied in other ways as his 
Spanish rival ; and probably, from the social hospi- 
tality of his life, spent a much larger portion of his 
time in no literary occupation at all." 

Of all the wonderful dramatic creations of Lope 
de Vega's genius, what now remains? Two or 
three plays only keep possession of the stage, and 
few, very few, are still read with pleasure in the 
closet. They have never been collected into a uni- 
form edition, and are now met with in scattered 
sheets only on the shelves of some mousing book- 
seller, or collected in miscellaneous parcels in the 
libraries of the curious. 

Scott, with all his facility of execution, had none 
of that pitiable affectation sometimes found in men 
of genius, who think that the possession of this qual- 
ity may dispense with regular, methodical habits of 
study. He was most economical of time. He did 
not, like Voltaire, speak of it as " a terrible thing 
that so much time should be wasted in talking." 
He was too little of a pedant, and far too benevo- 
lent, not to feel that there are other objects worth 
living for than mere literary fame ; but he grudged 
the waste of time on merely frivolous and heartless 
objects. " As for dressing when we are quite alone," 
he remarked one day to Mr. Gilhes, whom he had 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 235 

taken home with him to a family dinner, " it is out 
of the question. Life is not long enough for such 
fiddle-faddle." In the early part of his life he worked 
late at night, but, subsequently, from a conviction of 
the superior healthiness of early rising, as well as 
the desire to secure, at all hazards, a portion of the 
day for literary labour, he rose at five the year 
round ; no small effort, as any one will admit who 
has seen the pain and difficulty which a regular bird 
of night finds in reconciling his eyes to daylight. 
He was scrupulously exact, moreover, in the distri- 
bution of his hours. In one of his letters to his 
friend Terry, the player, replete, as usual, with ad- 
vice that seems to flow equally from the head and 
the heart, he says, in reference to the practice of 
dawdling away one's time, " A habit of the mind it 
is which is very apt to beset men of intellect and 
talent, especially when their time is not regularly 
filled up, but left to their own arrangement. But it 
is like the ivy round the oak, and ends by limiting, 
if it does not destroy, the powder of manly and ne- 
cessary exertion. I must love a man so well, to 
whom I offer such a word of advice, that I will not 
apologize for it, but expect to hear you are become 
as regular as a Dutch clock — hours, quarters^ minutes, 
all marked and appropriated." With the same em- 
phasis he inculcates the like habits on his son. If 
any man might dispense with them, it was surely 
Scott. But he knew that without them the greatest 
powers of mind will run to waste, and water but the 
desert. 



236 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Some of the literary opinions of Scott are singu- 
lar, considering, too, the position he occupied in the 
world of letters. " I promise you," he says, in an 
epistle to an old friend, " my oaks will outlast my 
laurels; and I pique myself more on my composi- 
tions for manure than on any other compositions to 
which I was ever accessary." This may seem had- 
inage ; hut he repeatedly, both in writing and con- 
versation, places literature, as a profession, below 
other intellectual professions, and especially the mil- 
itary. The Duke of Wellingto,n, the representative 
of the last, seems to have drawn from him a very 
extraordinary degree of deference, which we cannot 
but think smacks a little of that strong relish for 
gunpowder which he avows in himself 

It is not very easy to see on what this low esti- 
mate of literature rested. As a profession, it has 
too little in common with more active ones, to afford 
much ground for running a parallel. The soldier 
has to do with externals ; and his contests and tri- 
umphs are over matter in its various forms, whether 
of man or material nature. The poet deals with 
the bodiless forms of air, of fancy lighter than air. 
His business is contemplative, the other's is active, 
and depends for its success on strong moral energy 
and presence of mind. He must, indeed, have ge- 
nius of the highest order to effect his own combina- 
tions, anticipate the movements of his enemy, and 
dart with eagle eye on his vulnerable point. But 
who shall say that this practical genius, if we 
may so term it, is to rank higher in the scale than 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 237 

the creative power of the poet, the spark from the 
mind of divinity itself ? 

The orator might seem to afford better ground for 
comparison, since, though his theatre of action is 
abroad, he may be said to work with much the same 
tools as the writer. Yet how much of his success 
depends on qualities other than intellectual ! "Ac- 
tion," said the father of eloquence, "action, action 
are the three most essential things to an orator." 
How much depends on the look, the gesture, the 
magical tones of voice, modulated to the passions he 
has stirred ; and how much on the contagious sym- 
pathies of the audience itself, which drown every- 
thing like criticism in the overwhelming tide of 
emotion ! If any one would know how much, let 
him, after patiently standing 

" till his feet throb, 
And his head thumps, to feed upon the breath ' 
Of patriots .bursting with heroic rage," 

read the same speech in the columns of a morning 
newspaper, or in the well-concocted report of the 
orator himself The productions of the writer are 
subjected to a fiercer ordeal. He has no excited 
sympathies of numbers to hurry his readers along 
over his blunders. He is scanned in the calm silence 
of the closet. Every flower of fancy seems here to 
wither under the rude breath of criticism ; every 
Unk in the chain of argument is subjected to the 
touch of prying scrutiny, and if there be the least 
flaw in it, it is sure to be detected. There is no tri- 
bunal so stern as the secret tribunal of a man's own 



b 



238 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

closet, far removed from all the sympathetic impul- 
ses of humanity. Surely there is no form in which 
intellect can be exhibited to the world so completely 
stripped of all adventitious aids as the form of writ- 
ten composition. But, says the practical man, let 
us estimate things by their utihty. "You talk of 
the poems of Homer," said a mathematician, " but, 
after all, what do they ^rove V A question which 
involves an answer somewhat too voluminous for 
the tail of an article. But if the poems of Homer 
were, as Heeren asserts, the principal bond which 
held the Grecian states together, and gave them a 
national feeling, they "prove" more than all the 
arithmeticians of Greece — and there were many 
cunning ones in it — 'ever proved. The results of 
military skill are indeed obvious. The soldier, by 
a single victory, enlarges the limits of an empire ; 
he may do more — he may achieve the liberties of a 
nation, or roll back the tide of barbarism ready to 
overwhelm them. Wellington was placed in such a 
position, and nobly did he do his work ; or, rather, 
he was placed at the head of such a gigantic moral 
and physical apparatus as enabled him to do it. 
With his own unassisted strength, of course, he 
could have done nothing. But it is on his own sol- 
itary resources that the great writer is to rely. And 
yet, who shall say that the triumphs of WelUngton 
have been greater than those of Scott, whose works 
are familiar as household words to every fireside in 
his own land, from the castle to the cottage ; have 
crossed oceans and deserts, and, with healing on 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 239 

their wings, found their way to the remotest regions ; 
have helped to form the character, until his own 
mind may be said to be incorporated into those of 
hundreds of thousands of his fellow-men ? Who 
is there that has not, at some time or other, felt the 
heaviness of his heart hghtened, his pains mitigated, 
and his bright moments of life made still brighter by 
the magical touches of his genius ? And shall we 
speak of his victories as less real, less serviceable to 
humanity, less truly glorious than those of the great- 
est captain of his day ? The triumphs of the war- 
rior are bounded by the narrow theatre of his own 
age ; but those of a Scott or a Shakspeare will be 
renewed with greater and greater lustre in ages yet 
unborn, when the victorious chieftain shall be for- 
gotten, or shall live only in the song of the minstrel 
and the page of the chronicler. 

But, after all, this sort of parallel is not very gra- 
cious nor very philosophical, and, to say truth, is 
somewhat foolish. We have been drawn into it by 
the not random, but very deliberate, and, in our poor 
judgment, very disparaging estimate by Scott of his 
own vocation ; and, as we have taken the trouble to 
write it, our readers will excuse us from blotting it 
out. There is too little ground for the respective 
parties to stand on for a parallel. As to the pedan- 
tic cui hono standard, it is impossible to tell the final 
issues of a single act ; how can we then hope to 
those of a course of action ? As for the honour of 
different vocations, there never was a truer sentence 
than the stale one of Pope — stale now, because it is 
so true — 



240 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

" Act well your part — there all the honour lies." 

And it is the just boast of our own country, that in 
no civiHzed nation is the force of this philanthropic 
maxim so nobly illustrated as in ours — thanks to our 
glorious institutions. 

A great cause, probably, of Scott's low estimate of 
letters was the facihty with which he wrote. What 
costs us little we are apt to prize httle. If diamonds 
were as common as pebbles, and gold-dust as any 
other, who would stoop to gather them 1 It was the 
prostitution of his muse, by-the-by, for this same 
gold-dust, which brought a sharp rebuke on the poet 
from Lord Byron, in his " Enghsh Bards :" 

" For this we spurn Apollo's venal son ;" 

a coarse cut, and the imputation about as true as 
most satire, that is, not true at all. This was indi- 
ted in his lordship's earher days, when he most 
chivalrously disclaimed all purpose of bartering his 
rhymes for gold. He lived long enough, however, 
to w^eigh his literary wares in the same money-bal- 
ance used by more vulgar manufacturers ; and, in 
truth, it would be ridiculous if the produce of the 
brain should not bring its price in this form as well 
as any other. There is little danger, we imagine, of 
finding too much gold in the bowels of Parnassus. 

Scott took a more sensible view of things. In a 
letter to Ellis, written soon after the publication of 
" The Minstrelsy," he observes, '' People may say 
this and that of the pleasure of fame, or of profit, as 
a motive of writing, I think the only pleasure is in 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 241 

the actual exertion and research, and I would no 
more write upon any other terms than I would hunt 
merely to dine upon hare soup. At the same time, 
if credit, and profit came unlooked for, I would no 
more quarrel with them than with the soup." Even 
this declaration was somewhat more magnanimous 
than was warranted by his subsequent conduct. 
The truth is, he soon found out, especially after the 
Waverley vein had opened, that he had hit on a 
gold-mine. The prodigious returns he got gave the 
whole thing the aspect of a speculation. Every new 
work was an adventure, and the proceeds naturally 
suggested the indulgence of the most extravagant 
schemes of expense, which, in their turn, stimulated 
him to fresh eiforts. In this way the " profits" be- 
came, whatever they might have been once, a prin- 
cipal incentive to, as they were the recompense of, 
exertion. His productions were cash articles, and 
were estimated by him more on the Hudibrastic rule 
of " the real worth of a thing" than by any fanciful 
standard of fame. He bowed with deference to the 
judgment of the booksellers, and trimmed his sails 
dexterously as the " aura popularis" shifted. " If it 
is na weil bobbit," he writes to his printer, on turn 
ing out a less lucky novel, " we'll bobbit again." 
His muse was of that school who seek the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number. We can hardly 
imagine him invoking her hke Milton : 

" Still govern thou my song, 
Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 

Still less can we imagine him, like the blind old 

Hh 



242 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

bard, feeding his soul with visions of posthumous 
glory, and spinning out epics for five pounds apiece. 
It is singular that Scott, although he set as high 
a money value on his productions as the most en- 
thusiastic of the " trade" could have done, in a liter- 
ary view should have held them so cheap. " What- 
ever others may be," he said, " I have never been a 
partisan of my own poetry ; as John Wilkes de- 
clared, that, 'in the height of his success, he had 
himself never been a Wilkite.' " Considering the 
poet's popularity, this was but an indifferent com- 
pliment to the taste of his age. With all this dis- 
paragement of his own productions, however, Scott 
was not insensible to criticism. He says some- 
where that, " if he had been conscious of a single 
vulnerable point in himself, he would not have taken 
up the business of writing ;" but, on another occa- 
sion, he writes, " I make it a rule never to read the 
attacks made upon me ;" and Captain Hall remarks, 
" He never reads the criticisms on his books ; this 
I know, from the most unquestionable authority. 
Praise, he says, gives him no pleasure, and censure 
annoys him." Madame de Graffigny says, also, of 
Voltaire, " that he was altogether indifferent to 
praise, but the least word from his enemies drove 
him crazy." Yet both these authors banqueted on 
the sweets of panegyric as much as any who ever 
lived. They were in the condition of an epicure 
whose palate has lost its relish for the dainty fare 
in which it has been so long revelling, without be- 
coming less sensible to the annoyances of sharper 



SIR WALTER SCOTT. 243 

and coarser flavours. It may afford some consola- 
tion to humble mediocrity, to the less fortunate vo- 
taries of the muse, that those w^ho have reached the 
summit of Parnassus are not much more contented 
w^ith their condition than those who are scrambling 
among the bushes at the bottom of the mountain. 
The fact seems to be, as Scott himself intimates 
more than once, that the joy is in the chase, wheth- 
er in the prose or the poetry of hfe. 

But it is high time to terminate our lucubrations, 
which, however imperfect and unsatisfactory, have 
already run to a length that must trespass on the 
patience of the reader. We rise from the perusal 
of these delightful volumes with the same sort of 
melancholy feeling with which we wake from a 
pleasant dream. The concluding volume, of which 
such ominous presage is given in the last sentence 
of the fifth, has not yet reached us ; but we know 
enough to anticipate the sad catastrophe it is to un- 
fold of the drama. In those which we have seen, 
we have beheld a succession of interesting charac- 
ters come upon the scene and pass away to their 
long home. " Bright eyes now closed in dust, gay 
voices forever silenced," seem to haunt us, too, as 
we write. The imagination reverts to Abbotsford 
— the romantic and once brilliant Abbotsford — the 
magical creation of his hands. We see its halls ra- 
diant with the hospitality of his benevolent heart ; 
thronged with pilgrims from every land, assembled 
to pay homage at the shrine of genius ; echoing to 
the blithe music of those festal holydays when 



244 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

young and old met to renew the usages of the good 
old times. 

" These were its charms, but all these charms are fled," 

Its courts are desolate, or trodden only by the 
foot of the stranger. The stranger sits under the 
shadows of the trees which his hand planted. The 
spell of the enchanter is dissolved ; his wand is bro- 
ken ; and the mighty minstrel himself now sleeps in 
the bosom of the peaceful scenes embellished by his 
taste, and which his genius has made immortal. 



CHATEAUBRIAND S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 245 



CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE * 

OCTOBER, 1839. 

There are few topics of greater attraction, or, 
when properly treated, of higher importance, than 
Uterary history. For what is it but a faithful regis- 
ter of the successive steps by which a nation has 
advanced in the career of civilization? Civil his- 
tory records the crimes and the follies, the enterpri- 
ses, discoveries, and triumphs, it may be, of human- 
ity. But to what do all these tend, or of what 
moment are they in the eye of the philosopher, ex- 
cept as they accelerate or retard the march of civil- 
ization 1 The history of literature is the history of 
the human mind. It is, as compared with other 
histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the 
material — the informing spirit, as compared with the 
outward and visible. 

When such a view of the mental progress of a 
people is combined with individual biography, we 
have all the materials for the deepest and most va- 
ried interest. The life of the man of letters is not 
always circumscribed by the walls of a cloister; and 
was not, even in those days w^hen the cloister was 
the famihar abode of science. The history of Dante 
and of Petrarch is the best commentary on that of 
their age. In later times, the man of letters has 

* *' Sketches of English Literature ; with considerations on the Spirit 
of the Times, Men, and Revolutions. By the Viscount de Chateaubri- 
and." 2 vols., 8vo. London, 1836. 



k 



246 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

taken part in all the principal concerns of public 
and social life. But, even when the story is to de- 
rive its interest from personal character, what a store 
of entertainment is supplied by the eccentricities of 
genius — the joys and sorrows, not visible to vulgar 
eyes, but which agitate his finer sensibilities as pow- 
erfully as the greatest shocks of worldly fortune 
would a hardier and less visionary temper ! What 
deeper interest can romance afford than is to be 
gathered from the melancholy story of Petrarch, 
Tasso, Alfieri, Rousseau, Byron, Burns, and a crowd 
of familiar names, whose genius seems to have been 
given them only to sharpen their sensibility to suf- 
fering ? What matter if their sufferings were, for 
the most part, of the imagination 1 They were not 
the less real to the??i. They lived in a world of im- 
agination, and, by the gift of genius, unfortunate to 
its proprietor, have known how, in the language of 
one of the most unfortunate, " to make madness 
beautiful" in the eyes of others. 

But, notwithstanding the interest and importance 
of literary history, it has hitherto received but little 
attention from English writers. No complete survey 
of the treasures of our native tongue has been yet 
produced, or even attempted. The earlier periods 
of the poetical development of the nation have been 
well illustrated by various antiquaries. Warton has 
brought the history of poetry down to the season of 
its first vigorous expansion — the age of Elizabeth. 
But he did not penetrate beyond the magnificent 
vestibule of the temple. Dr. Johnson's "Lives of 



Chateaubriand's emglish literature. 247 

the Poets" have done much to supply the deficiency 
in this department. But much more remains to be 
done to afford the student anything hke a complete 
view of the progress of poetry in England. John- 
son's work, as every one knows, is conducted on 
the most capricious and irregular plan. The biog- 
raphies were dictated by the choice of the book- 
seller. Some of the most memorable names in Brit- 
ish literature are omitted to make way for a host of 
minor luminaries, whose dim radiance, unassisted by 
the critic's magnifying lens, would never have pene- 
trated to posterity. The same irregularity is visible 
in the proportion he has assigned to each of his 
subjects ; the principal figures, or what should have 
been such, being often thrown into the background, 
to make room for some subordinate person whose 
story was thought to have more interest. 

Besides these defects of plan, the critic was cer- 
tainly deficient in sensibility to the more delicate, 
the minor beauties of poetic sentiment. He ana- 
lyzes verse in the cold-blooded spirit of a chemist, 
until all the aroma, which constituted its principal 
charm, escapes in the decomposition. By this kind 
of process, some of the finest fancies of the Muse, 
the lofty dithyrambics of Gray, the ethereal effusions 
of Colhns, and of Milton too, are rendered sufficient- 
ly vapid. In this sort of criticism, all the effect that 
relies on impressions goes for nothing. Ideas are 
alone taken into the account, and all is weighed in 
the same hard, matter-of-fact scales of common 
sense, like so much soHd prose. What a sorry fig- 



248 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ure would Byron's Muse make subjected to such an 
ordeal! The doctor's taste in composition, to judge 
from his own style, was not of the highest order. It 
was a style, indeed, of extraordinary power, suited 
to the expression of his original thinking, bold, vig- 
orous, and glowing with all the lustre of pointed 
antithesis. But the brilliancy is cold, and the orna- 
ments are much too florid and overcharged for a 
graceful effect. When to these minor blemishes we 
add the graver one of an obUquity of judgment, pro- 
duced by inveterate political and religious prejudice, 
which has thrown a shadow over some of the bright- 
est characters subjected to his pencil, we have sum- 
med up a fair amount of critical deficiencies. With 
all this, there is no one of the works of this great 
and good man in which he has displayed more of the 
strength of his mighty intellect, shown a more pure 
and mascuhne morality, more sound principles of 
criticism in the abstract, more acute delineation of 
character, and more gorgeous splendour of diction. 
His defects, however, such as they are, must prevent 
his maintaining with posterity that undisputed dicta- 
torship in criticism which was conceded to him in 
his own day. We must do justice to his errors as 
well as to his excellences, in order that we may do 
justice to the characters which have come under his 
censure. And we must admit that his work, how- 
ever admirable as a gallery of splendid portraits, is 
inadequate to convey anything like a complete or 
impartial view of English poetry. 

The English have made but slender contributions 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 249 

to the history of foreign literatures. The most 
important, probably, are Roscoe's works, in which 
literary criticism, though but a subordinate feature, 
is the most valuable part of the composition. As 
to anything like a general survey of this department, 
they are wholly deficient. The deficiency, indeed, 
is likely to be supplied, to a certain extent, by the 
work of Mr. Hallam, now in progress of pubhca- 
tion; the first volume of which — the only one which 
has yet issued from the press — gives evidence of the 
same curious erudition, acuteness, honest impartial- 
ity, and energy of diction which distinguish the 
other writings of this eminent scholar. But the 
extent of his work, limited to four volumes, pre- 
cludes anything more than a survey of the most 
prominent features of the vast subject he has under- 
taken. 

The Continental nations, under serious discour- 
agements, too, have been much more active than the 
British in this field. The Spaniards can boast a 
general history of letters, extending to more than 
twenty volumes in length, and compiled with suffi- 
cient impartiality. The Italians have several such. 
Yet these are the lands of the Inquisition, where 
reason is hoodwinked, and the honest utterance of 
opinion has been recompensed by persecution, exile, 
and the stake. How can such a people estimate 
the character of compositions which, produced un- 
der happier institutions, are instinct with the spirit 
of freedom 1 How can they make allowance for the 
manifold eccentricities of a literature where thought 

Ii 



^ 



250 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

is allowed to expatiate in all the independence of in- 
dividual caprice I How can they possibly, trained 
to pay such nice deference to outward finish and 
mere verbal elegance, have any sympathy with the 
rough and homely beauties which emanate from the 
people and are addressed to the people ? 

The French, nurtured under freer forms of gov- 
ernment, have contrived to come under a system of 
literary laws scarcely less severe. Their first great 
dramatic production gave rise to a scheme of critical 
legislation, which has continued ever since to press 
on the genius of the nation in all the higher walks 
of poetic art. Amid all the mutations of state, the 
tone of criticism, has remained essentially the same 
to the present century, when, indeed, the boihng pas- 
sions and higher excitements of a revolutionary age 
have made the classic models on which their litera- 
ture was cast appear somewhat too frigid, and a 
warmer colouring has been sought by an infusion of 
English sentiment. But this mixture, or, rather, con- 
fusion of styles, neither French nor English, seems 
to rest on no settled principles, and is, probably, too 
ahen to the genius of the people to continue perma- 
nent. 

The French, forming themselves early on a for- 
eign and antique model, were necessarily driven to 
rules, as a substitute for those natural promptings 
which have directed the course of other modern na- 
tions in the career of letters. Such rules, of course, 
while assimilating them to antiquity, drew them aside 
from sympathy with their own contemporaries. How 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 251 

can they, thus formed on an artificial system, enter 
into the spirit of other literatures so uncongenial with 
their own l 

That the French continued subject to such a sys- 
tem, with little change to the present age, is evinced 
by the example of Voltaire, a writer w^hose lawless 
ridicule 

" like the wind, 
Blew where it listed, laying all things prone," 

but whose revolutionary spirit made no serious chan- 
ges in the principles of the national criticism. In- 
deed, his commentaries on Corneille furnish evidence 
of a wiUingness to contract still closer the range of 
the poet, and to define more accurately the laws by 
which his movements were to be controlled. Vol- 
taire's history affords an evidence of the truth of the 
Horatian maxim, " naturam expellas,^^ &c. In his 
younger days he passed some time, as is well known, 
in England, and contracted there a certain relish 
for the strange models which came under his obser- 
vation. On his return he made many attempts to 
introduce the foreign school with which he had be- 
come acquainted to his own countrymen. His van- 
ity was gratified by detecting the latent beauties of 
his barbarian neighbours, and by being the first to 
point them out to his countrymen. It associated 
him with names venerated on the other side of the 
Channel, and at home transferred a part of their 
glory to himself Indeed, he was not backward in 
transferring as much as he could of it, by borrowing 
on his own account, where he could venture, mani- 



\ 



252 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

bus plenis, and with very little acknowledgment. 
The French at length became so far reconciled to 
the monstrosities of their neighbours, that a regular 
translation of Shakspeare, the lord of the British 
Pandemonium, was executed by Letourneur, a schol- 
ar of no great merit ; but the work was well receiv- 
ed. Voltaire, the veteran, in his solitude of Ferney, 
was roused, by the applause bestowed on the Eng- 
lish poet in his Parisian costume, to a sense of his 
own imprudence. He saw, in imagination, the al- 
tars which had been raised to him, as well as to the 
other master-spirits of the national drama, in a fair 
way to be overturned, in order to make room for an 
idol of his own importation. " Have you seen," he 
writes, speaking of Letourneur's version, " his abom- 
inable trash 1 Will you endure the affront put upon 
France by it ] There are no epithets bad enough, 
nor fool's-caps, nor pillories enough in all France 
for such a scoundrel. The blood tingles in my old 
veins in speaking of him. What is the most dread- 
ful part of the affair is, the monster has his party in 
France ; and, to add to my shame and consterna- 
tion, it was I who first sounded the praises of this 
Shakspeare ; I who first showed the pearls, picked 
here and there, from his overgrown dungheap. Lit- 
tle did I anticipate that I was helping to trample 
under foot, at some future day, the laurels of Racine 
and Corneille to adorn the brows of a barbarous 
player — this drunkard of a Shakspeare." Not con- 
tent with this expectoration of his bile, the old poet 
transmitted a formal letter of remonstrance to D'Alem- 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 253 

bert, which was read pubUcly, as designed, at a reg- 
ular seance of the Academy. The document, after 
expatiating at length on the blunders, vulgarities, 
and indecencies of the English bard, concludes with 
this appeal to the critical body he was addressing : 
" Paint to yourselves, gentlemen, Louis the Four- 
teenth in his gallery at Versailles, surrounded by his 
brilliant court: a tatterdemalian advances, covered 
with rags, and proposes to the assembly to abandon 
the tragedies of Racine for a mountebank, full of 
grimaces, with nothing but a lucky hit, now and 
then, to redeem them." 

At a later period, Ducis, the successor of Voltaire, 
]f we remember right, in the Academy, a writer of 
far superior merit to Letourneur, did the British 
bard into much better French than his predecessor ; 
though Ducis, as he takes care to acquaint us, " did 
his best to efface those startling impressions of hor- 
ror which would have damned his author in the 
pohshed theatres of Paris !" Voltaire need not 
have taken the affair so much to heart. Shaks- 
peare, reduced within the compass, as much as pos- 
sible, of the rules, with all his eccentricities and pe- 
culiarities — all that made him English, in fact — 
smoothed away, may be tolerated, and to a certain 
extent countenanced, in the "polished theatres of 
Paris." But this is not 

" Shakspeare, Nature's child, 
Warbling his native wood-notes wild." 

The Germans are just the antipodes of their 
French neighbours. Coming late on the arena of 



254 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

modern literature, they would seem to be particular- 
ly qualified for excelling in criticism by the variety 
of styles and models for their study supplied by 
other nations. They have, accordingly, done vs^on- 
ders in this department, and have extended their 
critical wand over the remotest regions, dispelling 
the mists of old prejudice, and throwing the light of 
learning on what before was dark and inexplicable. 
They certainly are entitled to the credit of a singu- 
larly cosmopolitan power of divesting themselves of 
local and national prejudice. No nation has done 
so much to lay the foundations of that reconciling 
spirit of criticism, which, instead of condemning a 
difference of taste in different nations as a departure 
from it, seeks to explain such discrepancies by the 
peculiar circumstances of the nation, and thus from 
the elements of discord, as it were, to build up a 
universal and harmonious system. The exclusive 
and unfavourable views entertained by some of their 
later critics respecting the French literature, indeed, 
into which they have been urged, no doubt, by a de- 
sire to counteract the servile deference shown to that 
literature by their countrymen of the preceding age, 
forms an important exception to their usual candour. 
As general critics, however, the Germans are open 
to grave objections. The very circumstances of 
their situation, so favourable, as we have said, to the 
formation of a liberal criticism, have encouraged the 
taste for theories and for system-building, always un- 
propitious to truth. Whoever broaches a theory has 
a hard battle to fight with conscience. If the theo- 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 255 

ry cannot conform to the facts, so much the worse 
for the facts, as some wag has said; they must, at 
all events, conform to the theory. The Germans 
have put together hypotheses with the facility with 
which children construct card-houses, and many of 
them bid fair to last as long. They show more in- 
dustry in accumulating materials than taste or dis- 
cretion in their arrangement. They carry their fan- 
tastic imagination beyond the legitimate province of 
the muse into the sober fields of criticism. Their 
philosophical systems, curiously and elaborately de- 
vised, with much ancient lore and solemn imagin- 
ings, may remind one of some of those venerable 
English Cathedrals where the magnificent and mys- 
terious Gothic is blended with the clumsy Saxon. 
The efiect, on the whole, is grand, but grotesque 
withal. 

The Germans are too often sadly wanting in dis- 
cretion, or, in vulgar parlance, taste. They are per- 
petually overleaping the modesty of nature. They 
are possessed by a cold-blooded enthusiasm, if w^e 
may say so — since it seems to come rather from the 
head than the heart — which spurs them on over the 
plainest barriers of common sense, until even the 
right becomes the wrong. A striking example of 
these defects is furnished by the dramatic critic, 
Schlegel, whose "Lectures" are, or may be, famihar 
to every reader, since they have been reprinted in 
the English version in this country. No critic, not 
even a native, has thrown such a flood of light on the 
characteristics of the sweet bard of Avon. He has 



256 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

made himself so intimately acquainted with the pe- 
culiar circumstances of the poet's age and country, 
that he has been enabled to speculate on his produc- 
tions as those of a contemporary. In this way he 
has furnished a key to the mysteries of his composi- 
tion, has reduced what seemed anomalous to system, 
and has supplied Shakspeare's own countrymen with 
new arguments for vindicating the spontaneous sug- 
gestions of feeling on strictly philosophical princi- 
ples. Not content with this important service, he, 
as usual, pushes his argument to extremes, vindicates 
obvious blemishes as necessary parts of a system, and 
calls on us to admire, in contradiction to the most 
ordinary principles of taste and common sense. 
Thus, for example, speaking of Shakspeare's noto- 
rious blunders in geography and chronology, he 
coolly tells us, "I undertake to prove that Shaks- 
peare's anachronisms are, for the most part, com- 
mitted purposely, and after great consideration." In 
the same vein, speaking of the poet's villanous puns 
and quibbles, which, to his shame, or, rather, that of 
his age, so often bespangle with tawdry brilliancy the 
majestic robe of the Muse, he assures us that "the 
poet here probably, as everywhere else, has follow- 
ed principles which will bear a strict examination." 
But the intrepidity of criticism never went farther 
than in the conclusion of this same analysis, where 
he unhesitatingly assigns several apocryphal plays to 
Shakspeare, gravely informing us that the last three, 
"Sir John Oldcastle," "A Yorkshire Tragedy," and 
" Thomas Lord Cromwell," of which the English 



Chateaubriand's English literature, 257 

critics speak ^vith unreserved contempt, " are not 
only unquestionably Shakspeare's, but, in his judg- 
ment, rank among the best and ripest of his works !" 
The old bard, could he raise his head from the 
tomb, where none might disturb his bones, would 
exclaim, we imagine, " Non tali auxilio /" 

It shows a tolerable degree of assurance in a critic 
thus to dogmatize on nice questions of verbal resem- 
blance which have so long baffled the natives of the 
country, who, on such questions, obviously can be 
the only competent judges. It furnishes a striking 
example of the want of discretion noticeable in so 
many of the German scholars. With all these de- 
fects, however, it cannot be denied that they have 
widely extended the limits of rational criticism, and, 
by their copious stores of erudition, furnished the 
student with facilities for attaining the best points of 
view for a comprehensive survey of both ancient and 
modern literature. 

The English have had advantages, on the whole, 
greater than those of any other people, for perfecting 
the science of general criticism. They have had no 
academies to bind the wing of genius to the earth by 
their thousand wire-drawn subtleties. No Inquisi- 
tion has placed its burning seal upon the lip, and 
thrown its dark shadow over the recesses of the 
soul. They have enjoyed the inestimable privilege 
of thinking what they pleased, and of uttering what 
they thought. Their minds, trained to independ- 
ence, have had no occasion to shrink from encoun- 
tering any topic, and have acquired a masculine con- 

K K 



258 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

fidence, indispensable to a calm appreciation of the 
mighty and widely-diversified productions of genius, 
as unfolded under the influences of as widely-diver- 
sified institutions and national character. Their 
own hterature, with chameleon-like dehcacy, has 
reflected all the various aspects of the nation in the 
successive stages of its history. The rough, roman- 
tic beauties and gorgeous pageantry of the Eliza- 
bethan age, the stern, sublime enthusiasm of the 
Commonwealth, the cold brilliancy of Queen Anne, 
and the tumultuous movements and ardent sensibili- 
ties of the present generation, all have been reflect- 
ed as in a mirror, in the current of English Hterature, 
as it has flowed down through the lapse of ages. It 
is easy to understand what advantages this cultiva- 
tion of all these diflerent styles of composition at 
home must give the critic in divesting himself of 
narrow and local prejudice, and in appreciating the 
genius of foreign literatures, in each of which some 
one or other of these different styles has found fa- 
vour. To this must be added the advantages de- 
rived from the structure of the English language it- 
self, which, compounded of the Teutonic and the 
Latin, offers facilities for a comprehension of other 
literatures not afforded by those languages, as the 
German and the Italian, for instance, almost exclu- 
sively derived from but one of them. 

With all this, the English, as we have remarked, 
have made fewer direct contributions to general lit- 
erary criticism than the Continental nations, unless, 
indeed, we take into the account the periodical crit- 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 259 

icism, which has covered the whole field with a 
light skirmishing, very unlike any systematic plan 
of operations. The good effect of this guerilla war- 
fare may well be doubted. Most of these critics for 
the nonce (and we certainly are competent judges 
on this point) come to their work with little pre- 
vious preparation. Their attention has been habit- 
ually called, for the most part, in other directions, 
and they throw off an accidental essay in the brief 
intervals of other occupation. Hence their views 
are necessarily often superficial, and sometimes con- 
tradictory, as may be seen from turning over the 
leaves of any journal where literary topics are wide- 
ly discussed ; for, whatever consistency may be de- 
manded in politics or religion, very free scope is 
offered, even in the same journal, to literary specu- 
lation. Even when the article may have been the 
fruit of a mind ripened by study and meditation on 
congenial topics, it too often exhibits only the partial 
view suggested by the particular and limited direc- 
tion of the author's thoughts in this instance. Truth 
is not much served by this irregular process; and 
the general illumination, indispensable to a full and 
fair survey of the whole ground, can never be sup- 
plied from such scattered and capricious gleams, 
thrown over it at random. 

Another obstacle to a right result is founded in 
the very constitution of review- writing. Miscella- 
neous in its range of topics, and addressed to a mis- 
cellaneous class of readers, its chief reliance for suc- 
cess, in competition with the thousand novelties of 



260 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the day, is in the temporary interest it can excite. 
Instead of a conscientious discussion and cautious 
examination of the matter in hand, we too often find 
an attempt to stimulate the popular appetite by pi- 
quant salhes of wit, by caustic sarcasm, or by a pert, 
dashing confidence, that cuts the knot it cannot 
readily unloose. Then, again, the spirit of period- 
ical criticism would seem to be little favourable to 
perfect impartiality. The critic, shrouded in his 
secret tribunal, too often demeans himself like a 
stern inquisitor, whose business is rather to convict 
than to examine. Criticism is directed to scent out 
blemishes instead of beauties. '^ Judex damnatur 
cum nocens ahsolvitur'^ is the bloody motto of a well- 
known British periodical, which, under this piratical 
flag, has sent a broadside into many a gallant bark 
that deserved better at its hands. 

When we combine with all this the spirit of pa- 
triotism, or, what passes for such with nine tenths 
of the world, the spirit of national vanity, we shall 
find abundant motives for a deviation from a just, 
impartial estimate of foreign literatures. And if we 
turn over the pages of the best-conducted English 
journals, we shall probably find ample evidence of 
the various causes we have enumerated. We shall 
find, amid abundance of shrewd and sarcastic ob- 
servation, smart skirmish of wit, and clever antithe- 
sis, a very small infusion of sober, dispassionate crit- 
icism ; the criticism founded on patient study and on 
strictly philosophical principles ; the criticism on 
which one can safely rely as the criterion of good 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 261 

taste, and which, however tame it may appear to 
the jaded appetite of the hterary lounger, is the only 
one that wih attract the eye of posterity. 

The work named at the head of our article will, 
we suspect, notwithstanding the author's brilliant 
reputation, never meet this same eye of posterity. 
Though purporting to be, in its main design, an Es- 
say on Enghsh Literature, it is, in fact, a multifarious 
compound of as many ingredients as entered into 
the witches' caldron, to say nothing of a gallery of 
portraits of dead and living, among the latter of 
whom M. de Chateaubriand himself is not the least 
conspicuous. "I have treated of everything," he 
says, truly enough, in his preface, ^' the Present, the 
Past, the Future." The parts are put together in 
the most grotesque and disorderly manner, with 
some striking coincidences, occasionally, of charac- 
ters and situations, and some facts not familiar to 
every reader. The most unpleasant feature in the 
book is the doleful lamentation of the author over 
the evil times on which he has fallen. He has, in- 
deed, lived somewhat beyond his time, which was 
that of Charles the Tenth, of pious memory — the 
good old time of apostolicals and absolutists, which 
will not be likely to revisit France again very soon. 
Indeed, our unfortunate author reminds one of some 
weather-beaten hulk which the tide has left high 
and dry on the strand, and whose signals of distress 
are little heeded by the rest of the convoy, which 
have trimmed their sails more dexterously, and sweep 
merrily on before the breeze. The present work 



262 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

affords glimpses, occasionally, of the author's hap- 
pier style, which has so often fascinated us in his 
earlier productions. On the whole, however, it will 
add little to his reputation, nor, probably, much 
subtract from it. When a man has sent forth a 
score or two of octavos into the world, and as good 
as some of M. de Chateaubriand's, he can bear up 
under a poor one now and then. This is not the 
first indifferent work laid at his door, and, as he 
promises to keep the field for some time longer, it 
will probably not be the last 

We pass over the first half of the first volume to 
come to the Reformation, the point of departure, as 
it were, for modern civilization. Our author's views 
in relation to it, as we might anticipate, are not pre- 
cisely those we should entertain. 

" In a religious point of view," he says, " the Ref- 
ormation is leading insensibly to indifference, or the 
complete absence of faith ; the reason is, that the 
independence of the mind terminates in two gulfs, 
doubt and incredulity. 

" By a very natural reaction, the Reformation, at 
its birth, rekindled the dying flame of Catholic fa- 
naticism. It may thus be regarded as the indirect 
cause of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the dis- 
turbances of the League, the assassination of Henry 
the Fourth, the murders in Ireland, and of the revo- 
cation of the Edict of Nantes, and the dragonnades T 
—Vol. i., p. 193. 

As to the tendency of the Reformation towards 
doubt and incredulity, we know that free inquiry. 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 263 

continually presenting new views as the sphere of 
observation is enlarged, may unsettle old principles 
without establishing any fixed ones in their place, 
or, in other words, lead to skepticism ; but we doubt 
if this happens more frequently than under the op- 
posite system, inculcated by the Romish Church, 
which, by precluding examination, excludes the only 
ground of rational belief. At all events, skepticism, 
in the former case, is much more remediable than 
in the latter ; since the subject of it, by pursuing his 
inquiries, will, it is to be hoped, as truth is mighty, 
arrive at last at a right result; while the Romanist, 
inhibited from such inquiry, has no remedy. The 
ingenious author of " Doblado's Letters from Spain" 
has painted in the most affecting colours the state 
of such a mind, which, declining to take its creed at 
the bidding of another, is lost in a labyrinth of doubt 
without a clew to guide it. As to charging on the 
Reformation the various enormities with which the 
above extract concludes, the idea is certainly new. 
It is, in fact, making the Protestants guilty of their 
own persecution, and Henry the Fourth of his own 
assassination ; quite an original view of the subject, 
which, as far as we know, has hitherto escaped the 
attention of historians. 

A few pages farther, and we find the following 
information respecting the state of Catholicism in 
our own country : 

" Maryland, a Catholic and very populous state, 
made common cause with the others, and noiv most 
of the Western States are Catholic. The progress 



264 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of this communion in the United States of America 
exceeds behef There it has been invigorated in 
its evangeUcal ahment, popular hberty, while other 
communions decline in 'profound indifference^ — Vol. 
i., p. 201. 

We were not aware of this state of things. We 
did indeed know that the Roman Church had in- 
creased much of late years, especially in the Valley 
of the Mississippi : but so have other communions, 
as the Methodist and Baptist, for example, the latter 
of which comprehends five times as many disciples 
as the Roman Catholic. As to the population of 
the latter in the West, the whole number of Cath- 
olics in the Union does not amount, probably, to 
three fourths of the number of inhabitants in the 
single western State of Ohio. The truth is, that, 
in a country where there is no established or fa- 
voured sect, and where the clergy depend on volun- 
tary contribution for their support, there must be 
constant efforts at proselytism, and a mutation of 
religious opinion, according to the convictions, or 
fancied convictions of the converts. What one de- 
nomination gains another loses, till roused, in its 
turn, by its rival, new efforts are made to retrieve its 
position, and the equilibrium is restored. In the 
mean time, the population of the whole country 
goes forward with giant strides, and each sect boasts, 
'and boasts with truth, of the hourly augmentation of 
its numbers. Those of the Roman Catholics are 
swelled, moreover, by a considerable addition from 
emigration, many of the poor foreigners, especially 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 265 

the Irish, being of that persuasion. But this is no 
ground of triumph, as it infers no increase to the 
sum of Cathohcism, since what is thus gained in 
the New World is lost in the Old. 

Our author pronounces the Reformation hostile 
to the arts, poetry, eloquence, elegant literature, and 
even the spirit of military heroism. But hear his 
own words: 

" The Reformation, imbued with the spirit of its 
founder, declared itself hostile to the arts. It sack- 
ed tombs, churches, and monuments, and made in 
France and England heaps of ruins.". . . . 

" The beautiful in literature will be found to 
exist in a greater or less degree, in proportion as 
writers have approximated to the genius of the Ro- 
man Church." .... 

" If the Reformation restricted genius in poetry, 
eloquence, and the arts, it also checked heroism in 
war, for heroism is imagination in the military or- 
der."— Vol. i., p. 194-207. 

This is a sweeping denunciation ; and, as far as 
the arts of design are intended, may probably be 
defended. The Romish worship, its stately ritual 
and gorgeous ceremonies, the throng of numbers as- 
sisting, in one form or another, at the service, all 
required spacious and magnificent edifices, with the 
rich accessories of sculpture and painting, and mu- 
sic also, to give full effect to the spectacle. Never 
was there a religion which addressed itself more 
directly to the senses. And, fortunately for it, the 
immense power and revenues of its ministers enabled 

Ll 



266 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

them to meet its exorbitant demands. On so splen- 
did a theatre, and under such patronage, the arts 
were called into hfe in modern Europe, and most of 
all in that spot which represented the capital of 
Christendom. It was there, amid the pomp and 
luxury of reHgion, that those beautiful structures 
rose, with those exquisite creations of the chisel and 
the pencil, which imbodied in themselves all the 
elements of ideal beauty. 

But, independently of these external circumstan- 
ces, the spirit of Catholicism was eminently favour- 
able to the artist. Shut out ii'om free inquiry — 
from the Scriptures themselves — and compelled to 
receive the dogmas of his teachers upon trust, the 
road to conviction lay less through the understand- 
ing than the heart. The heart was to be moved, 
the affections and sympathies to be stirred, as well 
as the senses to be dazzled. This was the machi- 
nery by which alone could an effectual devotion to 
the faith be maintained in an ignorant people. It 
was not, therefore, Christ as a teacher delivering 
lessons of practical wisdom and morality that was 
brought before the eye, but Christ filling the offices 
of human sympathy, ministering to the poor and 
sorrowing, giving eyes to the blind, health to the 
sick, and hfe to the dead. It was Christ suffering 
under persecution, crowned with thorns, lacerated 
with stripes, dying on the cross. These sorrows 
and sufferings were understood by the dullest soul, 
and told more than a thousand homihes. So with 
the Virgin. It was not that sainted mother of the 



Chateaubriand's English literature, 267 

Saviour whom Protestants venerate, but do not wor- 
ship ; it was the Mother of God, and entitled, like 
him, to adoration. It was a woman, and, as such, 
the object of those romantic feelings which would 
profane the service of the Deity, but which are not 
the less touching as being in accordance with hu- 
man sympathies. The respect for the Virgin, indeed, 
partook of that which a Catholic might feel for his 
tutelar saint and his mistress combined. Orders of 
chivalry were dedicated to her service ; and her 
shrine was piled with more offerings and frequented 
by more pilgrimages than the altars of the Deity 
himself. Thus, feelings of love, adoration, and ro- 
mantic honour, strangely blended, threw a halo of 
poetic glory around their object, making it the most 
exalted theme for the study of the artist. What 
wonder that this subject should have called forth the 
noblest inspirations of his genius 1 What wonder 
that an artist like Raphael should have found in the 
simple portraiture of a woman and a child the ma- 
terials for immortality 1 

It was something like a kindred state of feeling 
which called into being the arts of ancient Greece, 
when her mythology was comparatively fresh, and 
faith was easy ; when the legends of the past, famil- 
iar as Scripture story at a later day, gave a real ex- 
istence to the beings of fancy, and the artist, im- 
bodying these in forms of visible beauty, but finished 
the work which the poet had begun. 

The Reformation brought other trains of ideas, 
and with them other influences on the arts, than those 



268 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of Catholicism. Its first movements were decidedly 
hostile, since the works of art, with which the tem- 
ples were adorned, being associated with the religion 
itself, became odious as the symbols of idolatry. But 
the spirit of the Reformation gave thought a new 
direction even in the cultivation of art. It was no 
longer sought to appeal to the senses by brilhant dis- 
play, or to waken the sensibilities by those superficial 
emotions w^hich find rehef in tears. A sterner, deep- 
er feeling was roused. The mind was turned within, 
as it were, to ponder on the import of existence and 
its future destinies ; for the chains were withdrawn 
from the soul, and it was permitted to wander at 
large in the regions of speculation. Reason took 
the place of sentiment — the useful of the merely or- 
namental. Facts were substituted for forms, even 
the ideal forms of beauty. There were to be no 
more Michael Angelos and Raphaels ; no glorious 
Gothic temples which consumed generations in their 
building. The sublime and the beautiful were not 
the first objects proposed by the artist. He sought 
truth — fidelity to nature. He studied the characters 
of his species as well as the forms of imaginary per- 
fection. He portrayed life as developed in its thou- 
sand peculiarities before his own eyes, and the ideal 
gave way to the natural. In this way, new schools 
of painting, hke that of Hogarth, for example, arose, 
which, however inferior in those great properties for 
which we must admire the masterpieces of Italian 
art, had a significance and philosophic depth which 
furnished quite as much matter for study and medi- 
tation. 



CHATEAUBRIAND S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 269 

A similar tendency was observable in poetry, el- 
oquence, and works of elegant literature. The in- 
fluence of the Reformation here was undoubtedly 
favourable, whatever it may have been on the arts. 
How could it be otherwise on literature, the written 
expression of thought, in which no grace of visible 
forms and proportions, no skill of mechanical execu- 
tion, can cheat the eye with the vain semblance of 
genius 1 But it was not until the warm breath of 
the Reformation had dissolved the icy fetters which 
had so long held the spirit of man in bondage that 
the genial current of the soul was permitted to flow, 
that the gates of reason were unbarred, and the mind 
was permitted to taste of the tree of knowledge, for- 
bidden tree no longer. Where was the scope for 
eloquence when thought was stifled in the very sanc- 
tuary of the heart? for out of the fulness of the heart 
the mouth speaketh. 

There might, indeed, be an elaborate attention to 
the outward forms of expression, an exquisite finish 
of verbal arrangement, the dress and garniture of 
thought. And, in fact, the Catholic nations have 
surpassed the Protestant in attention to verbal ele- 
gance and the soft music of numbers, to nice rhe- 
torical artifice and brilliancy of composition. The 
poetry of Italy and the prose of France bear ample ev- 
idence how much time and talent have been expend- 
ed on this beauty of outward form, the rich vehicle 
of thought. But where shall we find the powerful 
reasoning, various knowledge, and fearless energy of 
diction which stamp the oratory of Protestant Eng- 



270 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

land and America ? In France, indeed, where prose 
has received a higher poUsh and classic elegance 
than in any other country, pulpit eloquence has reach- 
ed an uncommon degree of excellence; for though 
much was excluded, the avenues to the heart, as with 
the painter and the sculptor, were still left open to 
the orator. If there has been a deficiency in this 
respect in the English Church, which all will not ad- 
mit, it arises probably from the fact that the mind, 
unrestricted, has been occupied with reasoning rath- 
er than rhetoric, and sought to clear away old prej- 
udices and establish new truths, instead of wakening 
a transient sensibility, or dazzling the imagination 
with poetic flights of eloquence. That it is the fault 
of the preacher, at all events, and not of Protestant- 
ism, is shown by a striking example under our own 
eyes, that of our distinguished countryman. Dr. Chan- 
ning, whose style is irradiated with all the splendours 
of a glowing imagination, showing, as powerfully as 
any other example, probably, in English prose, of 
what melody and compass the language is capable 
under the touch of genius instinct with genuine en- 
thusiasm. Not that we would recommend this style, 
grand and beautiful as it is, for imitation. We think 
we have seen the ill effects of this already in more 
than one instance. In fact, no style should be held 
up as a model for imitation. Dr. Johnson tells us, 
in one of those oracular passages somewhat thread- 
bare now, that "whoever wishes to attain an English 
style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not os- 
tentatious, must give his days and nights to the vol- 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 271 

umes of Addison." With all deference to the great 
critic, who, by the formal cut of the sentence just 
quoted, shows that he did not care to follow his own 
prescription, we think otherwise. Whoever would 
write a good Enghsh style, we should say, should ac- 
quaint himself with the mysteries of the language as 
revealed in the writings of the best masters, but should 
form his own style on nobody but himself. Every 
man, at least every man with a spark of originality 
in his composition, has his own peculiar way of think- 
ing, and, to give it effect, it must find its way out in 
its own peculiar language. Indeed, it is impossible 
to separate language from thought in that delicate 
blending of both which is called style ; at least, it is 
impossible to produce the same effect with the ori- 
ginal by any copy, however literal. We may imi- 
tate the structure of a sentence, but the ideas which 
gave it its peculiar propriety we cannot imitate. The 
forms of expression that suit one man's train of think- 
ing no more suit another's than one man's clothes 
will suit another. They will be sure to be either too 
large or too small, or, at all events, not to make what 
gentlemen of the needle call a good jit. If the party 
chances, as is generally the case, to be rather under 
size, and the model is over size, this will only expose 
his own littleness the more. There is no case more 
in point than that afforded by Dr. Johnson himself. 
His brilliant style has been the ambition of every 
schoolboy, and of some children of larger growth, 
since the days of the Rambler. But the nearer they 
come to it the worse. The beautiful is turned into 



272 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the fantastic, and the sublime into the ridiculous. 
The most curious example of this within our recol- 
lection is the case of Dr. Symmons, the English 
editor of Milton's prose writings, and the biographer 
of the poet. The little doctor has maintained 
throughout his ponderous volume a most exact imi- 
tation of the great doctor^ his sesquipedalian words, 
and florid rotundity of period. With all this cum- 
brous load of brave finery on his back, swelled to 
twice his original dimensions, he looks, for all the 
world, as he is, like a mere bag of wind — a scare- 
crow, to admonish others of the folly of similar dep- 
redations. 

But to return. The influence of the Reformation 
on elegant Uterature was never more visible than in 
the first great English school of poets, which came 
soon after it, at the close of the sixteenth century. 
The writers of that period displayed a courage, ori- 
ginality, and truth highly characteristic of the new^ 
revolution, which had been introduced by breaking 
down the old landmarks of opinion, and giving un- 
bounded range to speculation and inquiry. The 
first great poet, Spenser, adopted the same vehicle 
of imagination with the Itahan bards of chivalry, the 
romantic epic ; but instead of making it, like them, 
a mere revel of fancy, with no farther object than to 
delight the reader by brilliant combinations, he mor- 
alized his song, and gave it a deeper and more sol- 
emn import by the mysteries of Allegory, which, 
however prejudicial to its eflect as a work of art, 
showed a mind too intent on serious thoughts and 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 273 

inquiries itself to be content with the dazzUng but 
impotent coruscations of genius, that serve no other 
end than that of amusement. 

In the same manner, Shakspeare and the other 
dramatic writers of the time, instead of adopting the 
formal rules recognised afterward by the French 
writers, their long rhetorical flourishes, their exag- 
gerated models of character, and ideal forms, went 
freely and fearlessly into all the varieties of human 
nature, the secret depths of the soul, touching on all 
the diversified interests of humanity — for he might 
touch on all without fear of persecution — and thus 
making his productions a storehouse of philosophy, 
of lessons of practical wisdom, deep, yet so clear 
that he who runs may read. 

But the spirit of the Reformation did not descend 
in all its fulness on the Muse till the appearance of 
Milton. That great poet was in heart as thoroughly 
a Reformer, and in doctrine much more thoroughly 
so than Luther himself. Indignant at every effort 
to crush the spirit, and to cheat it, in his own words, 
" of that liberty which rarefies and enhghtens it like 
the influence of heaven," he proclaimed the rights 
of man as a rational, immortal being, undismayed by 
menace and obloquy, amid a generation of servile 
and unprincipled sycophants. The bhndness which 
excluded him from the things of earth opened to 
him more glorious and spirituahzed conceptions of 
heaven, and aided him in exhibiting the full influ- 
ence of those sublime truths which the privilege of 
free inquiry in rehgious matters had poured upon the 

M M 



274 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

mind. His Muse was as eminently the child of 
Protestantism as that of Dante, who resembled him 
in so many traits of character, was of Catholicism. 
The latter poet, coming first among the moderns, 
after the fountains of the great deep, which had so 
long overwhelmed the world, were broken up, dis- 
played, in his wonderful composition, all the ele- 
ments of modern institutions as distinguished from 
those of antiquity. He first showed the full and 
pecuhar influence of Christianity on literature, but 
it was Christianity under the form of Cathohcism. 
His subject, spiritual in its design, like Milton's, was 
sustained by all the auxiliaries of a visible and ma- 
terial existence. His passage through the infernal 
abyss is a series of tragic pictures of human wo, sug- 
gesting greater refinements of cruelty than were ever 
imagined by a heathen poet. Amid all the various 
forms of mortal anguish, we look in vain for the 
mind as a means of torture. In hke manner, in as- 
cending the scale of celestial being, we pass through 
M succession of brilliant /e^e^, made up of light, mu- 
sic, and motion, increasing in splendour and velocity, 
till all are lost and confounded in the glories of the 
Deity. Even the pencil of the great master, dipped 
in these gorgeous tints of imagination, does not 
shrink from the attempt to portray the outlines of 
Deity itself In this he aspired to what many of his 
countrymen in the sister arts of design have since 
attempted, and, like him, have failed ; for who can 
hope to give form to the Infinite ! In the same 
false style Dante personifies the spirits of evil, inclu- 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 275 

ding Satan himself. Much was doubtless owing to 
the age, though much, also, must be referred to the 
genius of Catholicism, which, appeahngto the senses, 
has a tendency to materialize the spiritual, as Pro- 
testantism, with deeper reflection, aims to spiritual- 
ize the material. Thus Milton, in treading similar 
ground, borrows his illustrations from intellectual 
sources, conveys the image of the Almighty by his 
attributes, and, in the frequent portraiture which he 
introduces of Satan, suggests only vague conceptions 
of form, the faint outlines of matter, as it were, 
stretching vast over many a rood, but towering sub- 
lime by the unconquerable energy of will — the fit 
representative of the principle of evil. Indeed, Mil- 
ton has scarcely anything of what may be called 
scenic decorations to produce a certain stage effect. 
His actors are few, and his action nothing. It is 
only by their intellectual and moral relations — by 
giving full scope to the 

" Cherub Contemplation — 
He that soars on golden wing, 
Guiding the fiery-wheeled throne"' 

that he has prepared for us visions of celestial beauty 
and grandeur which never fade from our souls. 

In the dialogue with which the two poets have 
seasoned their poems, we see the action of the oppo- 
site influences we have described. Both give vent 
to metaphysical disquisition, of learned sound, and 
iiuich greater length than the reader would desire ; 
but in Miiton it is the free discussion of a mind 
trained to wrestle boldly on abstrusest points of met- 



276 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

aphysical theology, while Dante follows in the same 
old barren footsteps which had been trodden by the 
schoolmen. Both writers were singularly bold and 
independent. Dante asserted that liberty which 
should belong to the citizen of every free state ; that 
civil liberty which had been sacrificed in his own 
country by the spirit of faction. But Milton claim- 
ed a higher freedom ; a freedom of thinking and of 
giving utterance to thought, uncontrolled by human 
authority. He had fallen on evil times ; but he had 
a generous confidence that his voice would reach to 
posterity, and would be a guide and a light to the 
coming generations. And truly has it proved so ; 
for in his writings we find the germs of many of the 
boasted discoveries of our own day in government 
and education, so that he may be fairly considered 
as the morning star of that higher civilization which 
distinguishes our happier era. 

Milton's poetical writings do not seem, however, 
to have been held in that neglect by his contempo- 
raries which is commonly supposed. He had at- 
tracted too much attention as a political controver- 
sialist, was too much feared for his talents, as well 
as hated for his principles, to allow anything which 
fell from his pen to pass unnoticed. Although the 
profits went to others, he lived to see a second edi- 
tion of " Paradise Lost," and this was more than 
was to have been fairly anticipated of a composition 
of this nature, however well executed, falling on 
such times. Indeed, its sale was no evidence that 
its merits were comprehended, and mav be referred 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 277 

to the general reputation of its author ; for we find 
so accompHshed a critic as Sir WiUiam Temple, 
some years later, omitting the name of Milton in his 
roll of writers who have done honour to modern lit- 
erature, a circumstance which may, perhaps, be im- 
puted to that reverence for the ancients which blind- 
ed Sir William to the merits of their successors. 
How could Milton be understood in his own gener- 
ation, in the grovelling, sensual court of Charles the 
Second ? How could the dull eyes, so long fastened 
on the earth, endure the blaze of his inspired genius 1 
It was not till time had removed him to a distance 
that he could be calmly gazed on and his merits 
fairly contemplated. Addison, as is well known, was 
the first to bring them into popular view, by a beau- 
tiful specimen of criticism that has permanently con- 
nected his name with that of his illustrious subject. 
More than half a century later, another great name 
in Enghsh criticism, perhaps the greatest in general 
reputation, Johnson, passed sentence of a very differ- 
ent kind on the pretensions of the poet. A produc- 
tion more discreditable to the author is not to be 
found in the whole of his voluminous works ; equally 
discreditable, whether regarded in an historical light 
or as a sample of literary criticism. What shall we 
say of the biographer who, in allusion to that affect- 
ing passage where the blind old bard talks of himself 
as " in darkness, and with dangers compass'd round," 
can coolly remark that " this darkness, had his eyes 
been better employed, might undoubtedly have de- 
served compassion ]" Or what of the critic who 



278 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

can saj of the most exquisite effusion of Doric min- 
strelsy that our language boasts, " Surely no man 
could have fancied that he read ' Lycidas' with 
pleasure, had he not known the author ;" and of 
" Paradise Lost" itself, that " its perusal is a duty 
rather than a pleasure I" Could a more exact meas- 
ure be afforded than by this single line of the poetic 
sensibility of the critic, and his unsuitableness for the 
office he had here assumed 1 His " Life of Milton" 
is a humiliating testimony of the power of political 
and religious prejudices to warp a great and good 
mind from the standard of truth, in the estimation, 
not merely of contemporary excellence, but of the 
great of other years, over whose frailties Time might 
be supposed to have drawn his friendly mantle. 

Another half century has elapsed, and ample jus- 
tice has been rendered to the fame of the poet by 
two elaborate criticisms: the one in the Edinburgh 
Review, from the pen of Mr. Macaulay ; the other by 
Dr. Channing, in the " Christian Examiner," since 
republished in his own works ; remarkable perform- 
ances, each in the manner highly characteristic of 
its author, and which have contributed, doubtless, to 
draw attention to the prose compositions of their 
subject, as the criticism of Addison did to his poetry. 
There is something gratifying in the circumstance 
that this great advocate of intellectual liberty should 
have found his most able and eloquent expositor 
among us, whose position qualifies us, in a peculiar 
manner, for profiting by the rich legacy of his genius. 
It w^as but discharging a debt of gratitude. 



CHATEAUBRIAND S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 2/^ 

Chateaubriand has much to say about Milton, for 
whose writings, both prose and poetry, notwithstand- 
ing the difference of their sentiments on ahnost all 
points of politics and religion, he appears to enter- 
tain the most sincere reverence. His criticisms are 
liberal and just; they show a thorough study of his 
author; but neither the historical facts nor the re- 
flections will suggest much that is new on a subject 
now become trite to the English reader. 

We may pass over a good deal of skimble-skam- 
ble stuff about men and things, which our author 
may have cut out of his commonplace-book, to come 
to his remarks on Sir Walter Scott, whom he does 
not rate so highly as most critics. 

" The illustrious painter of Scotland," he says, 
" seems to me to have created a false class ; he has, 
in my opinion, confounded history and romance. 
The novelist has set about writing historical roman- 
ces, and the historian romantic histories."— Vol. ii., 
p. 306. 

We should have said, on the contrary, that he 
had improved the character of both ; that he had 
given new value to romance by building it on his- 
tory, and new charms to history by embellishing it 
with the graces of romance. 

To be more explicit. The principal historical 
work of Scott is the "Life of Napoleon." It has, 
unquestionably, many of the faults incident to a 
dashing style of composition, which precluded the 
possibility of compression and arrangement in the 
best form of which the subject was capable. This, 



280 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. • 

in the end, may be fatal to the perpetuity of the 
work, for posterity will be much less patient than 
our own age. He will have a much heavier load to 
carry, inasmuch as he is to bear up under all of his 
own time, and ours too. It is very certain, then, 
some must go by the board ; and nine sturdy vol- 
umes, which is the amount of Sir Walter's English 
edition, will be somewhat alarming. Had he con- 
fined himself to half the quantity, there would have 
been no ground for distrust. Every day, nay, hour, 
we see, ay, and feel, the ill effects of this rapid style 
of composition, so usual with the best writers of our 
day. The immediate profits which such writers are 
pretty sure to get, notwithstanding the example of 
M. Chateaubriand, operate like the dressing improv- 
idently laid on a naturally good soil, forcing out 
noxious weeds in such luxuriance as to check, if not 
absolutely to kill, the more healthful vegetation. 
Quantities of trivial detail find their way into the 
page, mixed up with graver matters. Instead of 
that skilful preparation by which all the avenues 
verge at last to one point, so as to leave a distinct 
impression — an impression of unity — on the reader, 
he is hurried along zigzag, in a thousand directions, 
or round and round, but never, in the cant of the 
times, "going ahead" an inch. He leaves off pretty 
much where he set out, except that his memory may 
be tolerably well stuffed with facts, which, from want 
of some principle of cohesion, will soon drop out of 
it. He will find himself like a traveller who has 
been riding through a fine country, it may be, by 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 281 

moonlight, getting glimpses of every thing, but no com- 
plete, well-ilkiminated view of the whole (" quale per 
incertam lunaml' &c.) ; or, rather, like the same trav- 
eller, whizzing along in a locomotive so rapidly as 
to get even a glimpse fairly of nothing, instead of 
making his tour in such a manner as would enable 
him to pause at what was worth his attention, to 
pass by night over the barren and uninteresting, and 
occasionally to rise to such elevations as would af- 
ford the best points of view for commanding the va- 
rious prospect. 

The romance writer labours under no such em- 
barrassments. He may, undoubtedly, precipitate his 
work, so that it may lack proportion, and the nice 
arrangement required by the rules which, fifty years 
ago, would have condemned it as a w^ork of art. 
But the criticism of the present day is not so squeam- 
ish, or, to say truth, pedantic. It is enough for the 
writer of fiction if he give pleasure ; and this, eve- 
rybody knows, is not effected by the strict observ- 
ance of artificial rules. It is of little consequence 
how the plot is entangled, or whether it be untied 
or cut, in order to extricate the dramatis personce. 
At least, it is of little consequence compared with 
the true delineation of character. The story is ser- 
viceable only as it affords a means for the display of 
this ; and if the novelist but keep up the interest of 
his story and the truth of his characters, we easily 
forgive any dislocations which his light vehicle may 
encounter from too heedless motion. Indeed, rapid- 
ity of motion may in some sort favour him, keeping 

Nn 



282 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

up the glow of his invention, and striking out, as he 
dashes along, sparks of wit and fancy, that give a 
brilliant illumination to his track. But in history 
there must be another kind of process — a process at 
once slow and laborious. Old parchments are to be 
ransacked, charters and musty records to be deci- 
phered, and stupid, worm-eaten chroniclers, who 
had much more of passion, frequently, to bhnd, than 
good sense to guide them, must be sifted and com- 
pared. In short, a sort of Medea-like process is to 
be gone through, and many an old bone is to be 
boiled over in the caldron before it can come out 
again clothed in the elements of beauty. The 
dreams of the novelist — the poet of prose — on the 
other hand, are beyond the reach of art, and the 
magician calls up the most brilliant forms of fancy 
by a single stroke of his wand. 

Scott, in liis History, was reheved, in some de- 
o:ree, from this necessity of studious research, by bor- 
rowing his theme from contemporary events. It 
was his duty, indeed, to examine evidence carefully, 
and sift out contradictions and errors. This de- 
manded shrewdness and caution, but not much pre- 
vious preparation and study. It demanded, above 
all, candour ; for it was his business, not to make out 
a case for a client, but to weigh both sides, like an 
impartial judge, before summing up the evidence, and 
delivering his conscientious opinion. We believe 
there is no good ground for charging Scott with hav- 
ing swerved from this part of his duty. Those who 
expected to see him deify his hero, and raise altars to 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 283 

his memory, were disappointed ; and so were those, 
also, who demanded that the tail and cloven hoof 
should be made to peep out beneath the imperial 
robe. But this proves his impartiality. It would 
be unfair, however, to require the degree of impar- 
tiality which is to be expected from one removed to 
a distance from the theatre of strife, from those na- 
tional interests and feelings which are so often the 
disturbing causes of historic fairness. An Ameri- 
can, no doubt, would have been, in this respect, in a 
more favourable point of view for contemplating the 
European drama. The ocean, stretched between 
us and the Old World, has the effect of time, and 
extinguishes, or, at least, cools the hot and angry 
feelings, which find their way into every man's bo- 
som within the atmosphere of the contest. Scott 
was a Briton, with all the peculiarities of one — at 
least of a North Briton ; and the future historian, 
who gathers materials from his labours, will throw 
these national predilections into the scale in deter- 
mining the probable accuracy of his statements. 
These are not greater than might occur to any 
man, and allow^ance will always be made for them, 
on the ground of a general presumption ; so that a 
greater degree of impartiality, by leading to false 
conclusions in this respect, would scarcely have serv- 
ed the cause of truth better with posterity. An in- 
dividual who felt his reputation compromised may 
have joined issue on this or that charge of inaccu- 
racy, but no such charge has come from any of 
the leading journals in the country, which would not 



284 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

have been slow to expose it, and which would not, 
considering the great popularity, and, consequently, 
influence of the work, have omitted, as they did, to 
notice it at all, had it afforded any obvious ground 
of exception on this score. Where, then, is the 
romance which our author accuses Sir Walter of 
blending with history 1 

Scott was, in truth, master of the picturesque. 
He understood, better than any historian since the 
time of Livy, how to dispose his hghts and shades 
so as to produce the most striking result. This prop- 
erty of romance he had a right to borrow. This 
talent is particularly observable in the animated parts 
of his story — in his battles, for example. No man 
ever painted those terrible scenes with greater effect. 
He had a natural relish for gunpowder ; and his 
mettle roused, like that of the war-horse, at the sound 
of the trumpet. His acquaintance with military sci- 
ence enabled him to employ a technical phraseolo- 
gy, just technical enough to give a knowing air to 
his descriptions, without embarrassing the reader by 
a pedantic display of unintelligible jargon. This is 
a talent rare in a civilian. Nothing can be finer 
than many of his battle-pieces in his " Life of Bona- 
parte," unless, indeed, we except one or two in his 
" History of Scotland :" as the fight of Bannockburn, 
for example, in which Burns's " Scots, wha hae" 
seems to breathe in every line. 

It is when treading on Scottish ground that he 
seems to feel all his strength. " I seem always to 
step more firmly," he said to some one, " when on 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 285 

my own native heather." His mind was steeped in 
Scottish lore, and his bosom warmed with a sympa- 
thetic glow for the age of chivalry. Accordingly, 
his delineations of this period, whether in history or 
romance, are unrivalled ; as superior in effect to those 
of most compilers, as the richly-stained glass of the 
feudal ages is superior in beauty and briUiancy of 
tints to a modern imitation. If this be borrowing 
something from romance, it is, we repeat, no more 
than what is lawful for the historian, and explains 
the meaning of our assertion that he has improved 
history by the embelUshments of fiction. 

Yet, after all, how wide the difference between the 
province of history and of romance, under Scott's 
ow^n hands, may be shown by comparing his account 
of Mary's reign in his " History of Scotland," with 
the same period in the novel of "The Abbot." The 
historian must keep the beaten track of events. The 
novelist launches into the inimitable regions of fic- 
tion, provided only that his historic portraits be true 
to their originals. By due attention to this, fiction is 
made to minister to history, and may, in point of 
fact, contain as much real truth — truth of character, 
though not of situation. " The difference between 
the historian and me," says Fielding, " is, that with 
him everything is false but the names and dates, 
while with me nothing is false but these." There 
is, at least, as much truth in this as in most witti- 
cisjus. 

It is the great glory of Scott, that, by nice atten- 
tion to costume and character in his novels, he has 



286 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

raised them to historic importance, without impair- 
ing their interest as works of art. Who now would 
iaiagine that he could form a satisfactory notion of 
the golden days of Queen Bess, that had not read 
" Kenilworth 1" or of Richard Coeur-de-Lion and 
his brave paladins, that had not read " Ivanhoe V 
Why, then, it has been said, not-at once incorporate 
into regular history all these traits which give such 
historical value to the novel 1 Because, in this way, 
the strict truth which history requires would be vi- 
olated. This cannot be. The fact is, History and 
Romance are too near akin ever to be lawfully uni- 
ted. By mingling them together, a confusion is pro- 
duced, like the minghng of day and night, mystifying 
and distorting every feature of the landscape. It is 
enough for the novelist if he be true to the spirit ; 
the historian must be true, also, to the letter. He 
cannot coin pertinent remarks and anecdotes to il- 
lustrate the characters of his drama. He cannot 
even provide them with suitable costumes. He 
must take just what Father Time has given him, 
just what he finds in the records of the age, setting 
down neither more nor less. Now the dull chroni- 
clers of the old time rarely thought of putting down 
the smart sayings of the great people they biogra- 
phize, still less of entering into minute circumstan- 
ces of personal interest. These were too famihar to 
contemporaries to require it, and, therefore, they 
waste their breath on more solemn matters of state, 
all important in their generation, but not worth a 
rush in the present. What would the historian not 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 287 

give, could he borrow those fine touches of nature 
with which the novehst illustrates the characters ^of 
his actors — natural touches, indeed, but, in truth, just 
as artificial as any other part — all coined in the im- 
agination of the writer. There is the same differ- 
ence between his occupation and that of the novel- 
ist that there is between the historical and the por- 
trait painter. The former necessarily takes some 
great subject, with great personages, all strutting 
about in gorgeous state attire, and air of solemn 
tragedy, while his brother artist insinuates himself 
into the family groups, and picks out natural, famil- 
iar scenes and faces, laughing or weeping, but in the 
charming undress of nature. What wonder that 
novel-reading should be so much more amusing than 
history ? 

But we have already trespassed too freely on the 
patience of our readers, who will think the rambling 
spirit of our author contagious. Before dismissing 
him, however, we will give a taste of his quahty by 
one or two extracts, not very germane to English 
hterature, but about as much so as a great part of 
the work. The first is a poetical sally on Bona- 
parte's burial-place, quite in Monsieur Chateaubri- 
and's peculiar vein. 

" The solitude of Napoleon, in his exile and his 
tomb, has thrown another kind of spell over a brill- 
iant memory. Alexander did not die in sight of 
Greece ; he disappeared amid the pomp of distant 
Babylon. Bonaparte did not close his eyes in the 
presence of France ; he passed away in tlie gorgeous. 



288 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

horizon of the torrid zone. The man who had 
shown himself in such powerful reality, vanished hke 
a dream ; his life, which belonged to history, co-op- 
erated in the poetry of his death. He now sleeps 
forever, like a hermit or a paria, beneath a willow, 
in a narrow valley, surrounded by steep rocks, at the 
extremity of a lonely path. The depth of the si- 
lence which presses upon him can only be compa- 
red to the vastness of that tumult which had sur- 
rounded him. Nations are absent ; their throng has 
retired. The bird of the tropics, harnessed to the 
car of the sun, as Buffon magnificently expresses it, 
speeding his flight downward from the planet of 
light, rests alone, for a moment, over the ashes, the 
weight of which has shaken the equilibrium of the 
globe. 

" Bonaparte crossed the ocean to repair to his final 
exile, regardless of that beautiful sky which delighted 
Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Camoens. Stretch- 
ed upon the ship's stern, he perceived not that un- 
known constellations were sparkling over his head. 
His powerful glance, for the first time, encountered 
their rays. What to him were stars which he had 
never seen from his bivouacs, and which had never 
shone over his empire l Nevertheless, not one of 
them has failed to fulfil its destiny: one half of the 
firmament spread its light over his cradle, the other 
half was reserved to illuminate his tomb." — Vol. ii., 
p. 185, 186. 

The next extract relates to the British statesman, 
William Pitt: 



CHATEAUBRIAND S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 289 

"Pitt, tall and slender, had an air at once melan- 
choly and sarcastic. His delivery was cold, his in- 
tonation monotonous, his action scarcely perceptible. 
At the same time, the lucidness and the fluency of 
his thoughts, the logic of his arguments, suddenly 
irradiated with flashes of eloquence, rendered his tal- 
ent something above the ordinary line. 

" I frequently saw Pitt walking across St. James's 
Park from his own house to the palace. On his 
part, George the Third arrived from Windsor, after 
drinking beer out of a pewter pot with the farmers 
of the neighbourhood; he drove through the mean 
courts of his mean habitation in a gray chariot, fol- 
lowed by a few of the horse-guards. This was the 
master of the kings of Europe, as five or six mer- 
chants of the city are the masters of India. Pitt, 
dressed in black, with a steel-hilted sword by his 
side, and his hat under his arm, ascended, taking two 
or three steps at a time. In his passage he only met 
with three or four emigrants, who had nothing to do. 
Casting on us a disdainful look, he turned up his 
nose and his pale face, and passed on. 

"At home, this great financier kept no sort of or- 
der; he had no regular hours for his meals or for 
sleep. Over head and ears in debt, he paid nobody, 
and never could take the trouble to cast up a bill. 
A valet de charribre managed his house. Ill dressed, 
without pleasure, without passion, greedy of power, 
he despised honours, and would not be anything 
more than William Pitt. 

"In the month of June, 1822, Lord Liverpool 
Oo 



290 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

took me to dine at his country-house. As we cross- 
ed Putney Heath, he showed me the small house 
where the son of Lord Chatham, the statesman who 
had had Europe in his pay, and distributed with his 
own hand all the treasures of the world, died in 
poverty."— Vol. ii., p. 277, 278. . 

The following extracts show the changes that 
have taken place in English manners and society, 
and may afford the " whiskered pandour" of our own 
day an opportunity of contrasting his style of dan- 
dyism with that of the preceding generation: 

" Separated from the Continent by a long war, 
the English retained their manners and their nation- 
al character till the end of the last century. All was 
not yet machine in the working classes — -folly in the 
upper classes. On the same pavements where you 
now meet squalid figures and men in frock coats, 
you were passed by young girls with white tippets, 
straw hats tied under the chin with a riband, with 
a basket on the arm, in which was fruit or a book : 
all kept their eyes cast down ; all blushed when one 
looked at them. Frock coats, without any other, 
were so unusual in London in 179'3, that a woman, 
deploring with tears the death of Louis the Six- 
teenth, said to me, ' But, my dear sir, is it true that 
the poor king was dressed in a frock coat when they 
cut off his head V 

" The gentlemen-farmers had not yet sold their 
patrimony to take up their residence in London ; 
they still formed, in the House of Commons, that 
independent fraction which, transferring their sup- 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 291 

port from the opposition to the ministerial side, up- 
held the ideas of order and propriety. They hunted 
the fox and shot pheasants in autumn, ate fat goose 
at Michaelmas, greeted the sirloin with shouts of 
' Roast beef forever !' complained of the present, ex- 
tolled the past, cursed Pitt and the war, which doub- 
led the price of port wine, and went to bed drunk, 
to begin the same life again on the following day. 
They felt quite sure that the glory of Great Britain 
would not perish so long as ' God save the King' was 
sung, the rotten boroughs maintained, the game-laws 
enforced, and hares and partridges could be sold by 
stealth at market, under the names of lions and os- 
triches."— Vol. ii., p. 279, 280. 

" In 1822, at the time of my embassy to London, 
the fashionable was expected to exhibit, at the first 
glance, an unhappy and unhealthy man ; to have an 
air of negligence about his person, long nails, a beard 
neither entire nor shaven, but as if grown for a mo- 
ment unawares, and forgotten during the preoccupa- 
tions of wretchedness ; hair in disorder ; a sublime, 
mild, wicked eye ; lips compressed in disdain of hu- 
man nature; a Byronian heart, overwhelmed with 
weariness and disgust of hfe. 

" The dandy of the present day must have a con- 
quering, frivolous, insolent look. He must pay par- 
ticular attention to his toilet, wear mustaches, or a 
beard trimmed into a circle like Queen Elizabeth's 
ruff, or like the radiant disc of the sun. He shows 
the proud independence of his character by keeping 
his hat upon his head, by lolling upon sofas, by 



292 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

thrusting his boots into the faces of the ladies seated 
in admiration upon chairs before him. He rides 
with a cane, which he carries Hke a taper, regard- 
less of the horse, which he bestrides, as it were, by 
accident. His health must be perfect, and he must 
always have five or six felicities upon his hands. 
Some radical dandies, who have advanced the far- 
thest towards the future, have a pipe. But, no doubt, 
all this has changed, even during the time that I 
have taken to describe it." — Vol. ii., p. 303, 304. 

The avowed purpose of the present work, singu- 
lar as it may seem from the above extracts, is to 
serve as an introduction to a meditated translation 
of Milton into French, since wholly, or in part, 
completed by M. Chateaubriand, who thinks, truly 
enough, that Milton's " political ideas make him a 
man of our own epoch." When an exile in Eng- 
land, in his early life, daring the troubles of the Rev- 
olution, our author earned an honourable subsistence 
by translating some of Milton's verses ; and he now 
proposes to render the bard and himself the same 
kind office by his labours on a more extended scale. 
Thus he concludes : " I again seat myself at the 
table of my poet. He will have nourished me in 
my youth and my old age. It is nobler and safer to 
have recourse to glory than to power." Our author's 
situation is an indifferent commentary on the value 
of literary fame, at least on its pecuniary value. No 
man has had more of it in his day. No man has 
been more alert to make the most of it by frequent, 
reiterated appearance before the public — whether in 



Chateaubriand's English literature. 293 

full dress or dishabille, yet always before them ; and 
now, in the decline of life, we find him obtaining a 
scanty support by "French translation and Italian 
song." We heartily hope that the bard of " Para- 
dise Lost" will do better for his translator than he 
did for himself, and that M. de Chateaubriand will 
put more than five pounds in his pocket by his lit- 
erary labour. 



294 BIOGRAPHICAL Ax\D CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



BANCROTT'S UNITED STATES.^ 

JANUARY, 184L 

The celebrated line of Bishop Berkeley, 

"Westward the course of empire takes its way," 

is too gratifying to national vanity not to be often 
quoted (though not always quoted right) ; and if we 
look on it in the nature of a prediction, the comple- 
tion of it not being limited to any particular time, it 
will not be easy to disprove it. Had the bishop 
substituted " freedom" for " empire," it would be al- 
ready fully justified by experience. It is curious to 
observe how steadily the progress of freedom, civil 
and rehgious — of the enjoyment of those rights, which 
may be called the natural rights of humanity^ — has 
gone on from east to west, and how precisely the 
more or less liberal character of the social institu- 
tions of a country may be determined by its geo- 
graphical position, as falling within the limits of one 
of the three quarters of the globe occupied wholly or 
in part by members of the great Caucasian family. 

Thus, in x4sia we find only far-extended despot- 
isms, in which but two relations are recognised, 
those of master and slave : a solitary master, and a 
nation of slaves. No Constitution exists there to 
limit his authority; no intermediate body to coun- 

* "History of the United States from the Discovery of the American 
Continent. By George Bancroft." Vol.iii. Boston : Charles 0. Little 
and James Brown. 8vo, pp. 468. 



r\^ 



Bancroft's united states. 295 

terbalance, or, at least, shield the people from its 
exercise. The people have no political existence. 
The monarch is literally the state. The religion 
of such countries is of the same complexion with 
their government. The free spirit of Christianity, 
quickening and elevating the soul by the conscious- 
ness of its glorious destiny, made few proselytes 
there ; but Mohammedanism, with its doctrines of 
bUnd fataUty, found ready favour with those who 
had already surrendered their wills — their responsi- 
bility — to an earthly master. In such countries, of 
course, there has been little progress in science. 
Ornamental arts, and even the literature of imagina- 
tion, have been cultivated with various success ; but 
little has been done in those pursuits which depend 
on freedom of inquiry, and are connected with the 
best interests of humanity. The few^ monuments 
of an architectural kind that strike the traveller's 
eye are the cold memorials of pomp and selfish van- 
ity, not those of public spirit, directed to enlarge the 
resources and civilization of an empire. 

As we cross the boundaries into Europe, among 
the people of the same primitive stock and under 
the same parallels, we may imagine ourselves trans- 
planted to another planet. Man no longer grovels 
in the dust beneath a master's frown. He walks 
erect, as lord of the creation, his eyes raised to that 
heaven to which his destinies call him. He is a 
free agent — thinks, speaks, acts for himself; enjoys 
the fruits of his own industry ; follows the career 
suited to his own genius and tas^ ; explores fear- 



296 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

lessly the secrets of time and nature ; lives under 
laws which he has assisted in framing; demands 
justice as his right when those laws are invaded. 
In his freedom of speculation and action he has de- 
vised various forms of government. In most of them 
the monarchical principle is recognised ; but the 
power of the monarch is hmited by written or cus- 
tomary rules. The people at large enter more or 
less into the exercise of government ; and a numer- 
ous aristocracy, interposed between them and the 
crown, secures them from the oppression of Eastern 
tyranny, while this body itself is so far an improve- 
ment in the social organization, that the power, 
instead of being concentrated in a single person 
— plaintiff, judge, and executioner — is distributed 
among a large number of diiferent individuals and 
interests. This is a great advance, in itself, towards 
popular freedom. 

The tendency, almost universal, is to advance still 
farther. It is this war of opinion — this contest be- 
tween light and darkness, now" going forward in 
most of the countries of Europe — which furnishes 
the point of view from which their history is to be 
studied in the present, and, it may be, the following 
centuries ; for revolutions in society, when founded 
on opinion — the only stable foundation, the only 
foundation at which the friend of humanity does not 
shudder — must be the slow work of time ; and who 
would wish the good cause to be so precipitated 
that, in eradicating the old abuses which have inter- 
woven themselves with every stone and pillar of the 



Bancroft's united states. 297 

building, the noble building itself, which has so long 
afforded security to its inmates, should be laid in 
ruins 1 What is the best, what the worst form of 
government, in the abstract, may be matter of de- 
bate ; but there can be no doubt that the best will 
become the worst to a people who blindly rush into 
it without the preliminary training for comprehend- 
ing and conducting it. Such transitions must, at 
least, cost the sacrifice of generations ; and the pa- 
triotism must be singularly pure and abstract which, 
at such cost, would purchase the possible, or even 
probable, good of a remote posterity. Various have 
been the efforts in the Old World at popular forms 
of government, but, from some cause or other, they 
have failed ; and however time, a wider intercourse, 
a greater familiarity with the practical duties of 
representation, and, not least of all, our own auspi- 
cious example, may prepare the European mind for 
the possession of Repubhcan freedom, it is very cer- 
tain that, at the present moment, Europe is not the 
place for Republics. 

The true soil for these is our own continent, the 
New World, the last of the three great geographical 
divisions of which we have spoken. This is the 
spot on which the beautiful theories of the European 
philosopher — who had risen to the full freedom of 
speculation, while action was controlled — have been 
reduced to practice. The atmosphere here seems 
as fatal to the arbitrary institutions of the Old 
World as that has been to the Democratic forms of 
our own. It seems scarcely possible that any other 

Pp 



298 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

organization than these latter should exist here. In 
three centuries from the discovery of the country, 
the various races by which it is tenanted, some of 
them from the least liberal of the European mon- 
archies, have, with few exceptions, come into the 
adoption of institutions of a Republican character. 
Toleration, civil and religious, has been proclaimed, 
and enjoyed to an extent unknown since the world 
began, throughout the wide borders of this vast con- 
tinent. Alas ! for those portions which have assu- 
med the exercise of these rights without fully com- 
prehending their import ; who have been intoxicated 
with the fumes of freedom instead of drawing nour- 
ishment from its living principle. 

It was a fortunate, or, to speak more properly, a 
providential thing, that the discovery of the New 
World was postponed to the precise period when it 
occurred. Had it taken place at an earlier time — 
during the flourishing period of the feudal ages, for 
example- — the old institutions of Europe, with their 
hallowed abuses, might have been ingrafted on this 
new stock, and, instead of the fruit of the tree of 
life, we should have furnished only varieties of a kind 
already far exhausted and hastening to decay. But, 
happily, some important discoveries in science, and, 
above all, the glorious Reformation, gave an electric 
shock to the inteUect, long benumbed under the in- 
fluence of a tyrannical priesthood. It taught men to 
distrust authority, to trace effects back to their caus- 
es, to search for themselves, and to take no guide but 
the reason which God had given them. It taught 



Bancroft's united states. 299 

them to claim the right of free inquiry as their in- 
alienable birthright, and, with free inquiry, freedom 
of action. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
were the period of the mighty struggle between the 
conflicting elements of religion, as the eighteenth 
and nineteenth have been that of the great contest 
for civil liberty. 

It was in the midst of this universal ferment, and 
in consequence of it, that these shores were first 
peopled by our Puritan ancestors. Here they found 
a world where they might verify the value of those 
theories which had been derided as visionary or 
denounced as dangerous in their own land. All 
around was free — free as nature herself: the mighty 
streams rolling on in their majesty, as they had con- 
tinued to roll from the creation ; the forests, which 
no hand had violated, flourishing in primeval gran- 
deur and beauty ; their only tenants the wild ani- 
mals, or the Indians nearly as wild, scarcely held 
together by any tie of social polity. Nowhere was 
the trace of civilized man or of his curious contri- 
vances. Here was no Star Chamber nor Court of 
High Commission ; no racks, nor jails, nor gibbets ; 
no feudal tyrant to grind the poor man to the dust 
on which he toiled ; no Inquisition, to pierce into 
the thought, and to make thought a crime. The 
only eye that was upon them was the eye of Heaven. 

True, indeed, in the first heats of suffering enthu- 
siasm they did not extend that charity to others 
which they claimed for themselves. It was a blot 
on their characters, but one which they share in 



300 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

common with most reformers. The zeal requisite 
for great revolutions, whether in church or state, is 
rarely attended by charity for difference of opinion. 
Those who are willing to do and to suffer bravely 
for their own doctrines, attach a value to them which 
makes them impatient of opposition from others. 
The martyr for conscience' sake cannot comprehend 
the necessity of leniency to those who denounce 
those truths for which he is prepared to lay down 
his own life. If he set so little value on his own life, 
is it natural he should set more on that of others ? 
The Dominican, who dragged his victims to the 
fires of the Inquisition in Spain, freely gave up his 
ease and his life to the duties of a missionary among 
the heathen. The Jesuits, who suffered martyrdom 
among the American savages in the propagation of 
their faith, stimulated those very savages to their hor- 
rid massacres of the Protestant settlements of New- 
England. God has not often combined charity with 
enthusiasm. When he has done so, he has pro- 
duced his noblest work — a More, or a Fenelon. 

But if the first settlers were intolerant in practice, 
they brought with them the living principle of free- 
dom, which would survive when their generation had 
passed away. They could not avoid it; for their 
coming here was in itself an assertion of that prin- 
ciple. They came for conscience' sake — to worship 
God in their own way. Freedom of political insti- 
tutions they at once avowed. Every citizen took 
his part in the political scheme, and enjoyed all the 
consideration of an equal participation in civil privi- 



Bancroft's united states. 301 

leges: and liberty in political matters gradually 
brought with it a corresponding liberty in religious 
concerns. In their subsequent contest with the 
mother country they learned a reason for their faith, 
and the best manner of defending it. Their liber- 
ties struck a deep root in the soil amid storms which 
shook, but could not prostrate them. It is this strug- 
gle with the mother country, this constant assertion 
of the right of self-government, this tendency — fee- 
ble in its beginning, increasing with increasing age 
— towards Republican institutions, which connects 
the Colonial history with that of the Union, and 
forms the true point of view from which it is to be 
regarded. 

The history of this country naturally divides it- 
self into three great periods : the Colonial, when the 
idea of independence was slowly and gradually ri- 
pening in the American mind ; the Revolutionary, 
when this idea was maintained by arms ; and that 
of the Union, when it was reduced to practice. 
The first two heads are now ready for the historian ; 
the last is not yet ripe for him. Important contribu- 
tions may be made to it in the form of local narra- 
tives, personal biographies, political discussions, sub- 
sidiary documents, and memoires pour servir ; but we 
are too near the strife, too much in the dust and 
mist of the parties, to have reached a point sufficient- 
ly distant and elevated to embrace the whole field 
of operations in one view, and paint it in its true 
colours and proportions for the eye of posterity. 
We are, besides, too new as an independent nation. 



302 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

our existence has been too short, to satisfy the skep- 
ticism of those who distrust the perpetuity of our po- 
Htical institutions. They do not consider the prob- 
lem, so important to humanity, as yet solved. Such 
skeptics are found, not only abroad, but at home. 
Not that the latter suppose the possibihty of again 
returning to those forms of arbitrary government 
which belong to the Old World. It would not be 
more chimerical to suspect the Emperor Nicholas, 
or Prince Metternich, or the citizen-king Louis 
Philippe, of being Republicans at heart, and sighing 
for a democracy, than to suspect the people of this 
country (above all, of New-England, the most thor- 
ough democracy in existence) — who have inherited 
RepubHcan principles and feehngs from their ances- 
tors, drawn them in with their mother's milk, breath- 
ed the atmosphere of them from their cradle, partici- 
pated in their equal rights and glorious privileges — 
of foregoing their birthright and falsifying their na- 
ture so far as to acquiesce in any other than a pop- 
ular form of government. But there are some skep- 
tics who, when they reflect on the fate of similar 
institutions in other countries ; when they see our 
sister states of South America, after nobly winning 
their independence, split into insignificant fractions j 
• when they see the abuses which from time to time 
have crept into our own administration, and the vi- 
olence offered, in manifold w^ays, to the Constitution; 
when they see ambitious and able statesmen in one 
section of the country proclaiming principles which 
must palsy the arm of the Federal Government, and 



Bancroft's united states. 303 

urging the people of their own quarter to efforts for 
securing their independence of every other quarter 
— there are, we say, some wise and benevolent 
minds among us, who, seeing all this, feel a natural 
distrust as to the stabiUty of the federal compact, and 
consider the experiment as still in progress. 

We, indeed, are not of that number, while we re- 
spect and feel the weight of their scruples. We 
sympathize fully in those feelings, those hopes, it 
may be, which animate the great mass of our coun- 
trymen. Hope is the attribute of republics : it 
should be pecuharly so of ours. Our fortune is all 
in the advance. We have no past, as compared 
with the nations of the Old World. Our existence 
is but two centuries, dating from our embryo state ; 
our real existence as an independent people little 
more than half a century. We are to look forward, 
then, and go forward, not with vainglorious boast- 
ing, but with resolution and honest confidence. 
Boasting, indecorous in all, is pecuharly so in those 
who take credit for the great things they are going 
to do, not those they have done. The glorification 
of an Englishman or a Frenchman, with a long line 
of annals in his rear, may be offensive ; that of an 
American is ridiculous. But we may feel a just 
confidence from the past that we shall be true to 
ourselves for the future ; that, to borrow a cant 
phrase of the day, we shall be true to our mission — 
the most momentous ever intrusted to a nation ; that 
there is sufficient intelhgence and moral principle in 
the people, if not always to choose the best rulers, 



304 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

at least to right themselves by the ejection of bad 
ones when they find they have been abused; that 
they have intelligence enough to understand that 
their only consideration, their security as a nation, 
is in union ; that separation into smaller communi- 
ties is the creation of so many hostile states; that 
a large extent of empire, instead of being an evil, 
from embracing regions of irreconcilable local inter- 
ests, is a benefit, since it affords the means of that 
commercial reciprocity which makes the country, 
by its own resources, independent of every other; 
and that the representatives drawn from these "mag- 
nificent distances" will, on the whole, be apt to le- 
gislate more independently, and on broader princi- 
ples, than if occupied with the concerns of a petty 
state, where each legislator is swayed by the paltry 
factions of his own village. In all this we may hon- 
estly confide; but our confidence will not pass for 
argument, will not be accepted as a solution of the 
problem. Time only can solve it; and until the pe- 
riod has elapsed which shall have fairly tried the 
strength of our institutions, through peace and through 
war, through adversity and more trying prosperity, 
the time will not have come to write the history of 
the Union.* 

* The preceding cheering remarks on the auspicious destinies of our 
country were written more than four years ago ; and it is not now as 
many days since we have received the melancholy tidings that the pro- 
ject for the Annexation of Texas has been sanctioned by Congress. The 
remarks in the text on " the extent of empire" had reference only to that 
legitimate extent which might grow out of the peaceful settlement and 
civilization of a territory, sufficiently ample certainly, that already be- 
longs to us. The craving for foreign acquisitions has ever been a most 



Bancroft's united states. 305 

But still, results have been obtained sufficiently 
glorious to give great consideration to the two pre- 
liminary narratives, namely, of the Colonies and the 
Revolution, wdiich prepared the way for the Union. 
Indeed, without these results, they would both, how- 
ever important in themselves, have lost much of their 
dignity and interest. Of these two narratives, the 
former, although less momentous than the latter, is 
most difficult to treat. 

It is not that the historian is called on to pry into 
the dark recesses of antiquity, the twilight of civili- 
zation, mystifying and magnifying every object to 
the senses, nor to unravel some poetical mythology, 
hanging its metaphorical illusions around everything 
in nature, mingling fact with fiction, the material 
with the spiritual, until the honest inquirer after truth 
may fold his arms in despair before he can cry 
evpTjica ; nor is he compelled to unroll musty, worm- 
eaten parchments, and dusty tomes in venerable 
black letter, of the good times of honest Caxton and 
Winken de Worde, nor to go about gleaning tra- 
ditionary tales and ballads in some obsolete provin- 

fatal symptom in the history of republics ; but when these acquisitions 
are made, as in the present instance, in contempt of constitutional law, 
and in disregard of the great principles of international justice, the evil 
assumes a tenfold magnitude ; for it flows not so much from the single 
act as from the principle on which it rests, and which may open the way 
to the indefinite perpetration of such acts. In glancing my eye over the 
text at this gloomy moment, and considering its general import, I was 
unwilling to let it go into the world with my name to it, without enter- 
ing my protest, in common with so many better and wiser in our coun- 
try, against a measure which every friend of freedom, both at home and 
abroad, may justly lament as the most serious shock yet given to the 
stability of our glorious institutions. 



^ 



306 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

cm\ paiois. The record is plain and legible, and he 
need never go behind it. The antiquity of his 
story goes but little more than two centuries back ; 
a very modern antiquity. The commencement of it 
was not in the dark ages, but in a period of illumi- 
nation ; an age yet glowing with the imagination of 
Shakspeare and Spenser, the philosophy of Bacon, 
the learning of Coke and of Hooker. The early 
passages of his story — coeval with Hampden, and 
Milton, and Sidney — belong to the times in which 
the same struggle for the rights of conscience was 
going on in the land of our fathers as in our own. 
There was no danger that the light of the Pilgrim 
should be hid under a bushel, or that there should 
be any dearth of chronicler or bard — such as they 
were — to record his sacrifice. And fortunate for us 
that it was so, since in this way every part of this 
great enterprise, from its conception to its consum- 
mation, is brought into the light of day. We are 
put in possession, not merely of the action, but of 
the motives which led to it ; and as to the character 
of the actors, are enabled to do justice to those who, 
if we pronounce from their actions only, w^ould seem 
not always careful to do justice to themselves. 

The embarrassment of the Colonial history arises 
from the difficulty of obtaining a central point of in- 
terest among so many petty states, each independent 
of the others, and all, at the same time, so depend- 
ant on a foreign one as to impair the historic digni- 
ty which attaches to great, powerful, and self-regu- 
lated communities. This embarrassment must be 



Bancroft's united states. 307 

overcome by the author's detecting, and skilfully 
keeping before the reader, some great principle of 
action, if such exist, that may give unity, and, at the 
^ame time, importance to the theme. Such a prin- 
ciple did exist in that tendency to independence, 
w^hich, however feeble, till fanned by the breath of 
persecution into a blaze, w^as nevertheless the vivi- 
fying principle, as before remarked, of our ante-rev- 
olutionary annals. 

Whoever has dipped much into historical reading 
is aware how few have succeeded in w^eaving an 
harmonious tissue from the motley and tangled skein 
of general history. The most fortunate illustration 
of this within our recollection is Sismondi's Repuh^ 
liques ltaliennes,di work in sixteen volumes, in which 
the author has brought on the stage all the various 
governments of Italy for a thousand years, and in 
almost every variety of combination. Yet there is 
a pervading principle in this great mass of apparent- 
ly discordant interests. That principle was the rise 
and decline of hberty. It is the key-note to every 
revolution that occurs. It give an harmonious tone 
to the many-coloured canvass, which would else 
have offended by its glaring contrasts, and the start- 
ling violence of its transitions. The reader is inter- 
ested in spite of the transitions, but knows not the 
cause. This is the skill of the great artist. So true 
is this, that the same author has been able to con- 
centrate what may be called the essence of his 
bulky history into a single volume, in which he con- 
fines himself to the development of the animating 



308 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

principle of his narrative, stripped of all the super- 
fluous accessories, under the significant title of 
" Rise, Progress, and Decline of Itahan Freedom." 

This embarrassment has not been easy to over> 
come by the writers of our Colonial annals. The 
first volume of Marshall's " Life of Washington" has 
great merit as a v^ise and comprehensive survey of 
this early period, but the plan is too limited to af- 
ford room for anything like a satisfactory fulness of 
detail. The most thorough w^ork, and incompara- 
bly the best on the subject, previous to the appear- 
ance of Mr. Bancroft's, is the w^ell-known history by 
Mr. Grahame, a truly valuable book, in w^hich the 
author, though a foreigner, has show^n himself capa- 
ble of appreciating the motives and comprehending 
the institutions of our Puritan ancestors. He has 
spared no pains in the investigation of such original 
sources as were at his command, and has conduct- 
ed his inquiries with much candour, manifesting 
throughout the spirit of a scholar and a gentleman. 
It is not very creditable to his countrymen that 
thej should have received his labours with the apa- 
thy wMch he tells us they have, amid the ocean of 
contemptible trash with which their press is daily 
deluged. But, in truth, the Colonial and Revolu- 
tionary story of this country is a theme too ungrate- 
ful to British ears for us to be astonished at any in- 
sensibility on this score. 

Mr. Grahame's work, however, with all its merit, 
is the work of di foreigner, and that word compre- 
hends much that cannot be overcome by the best 



Bancroft's UiNited states. 309 

writer. He may produce a beautifal composition, 
faultless in style, accurate in the delineation of prom- 
inent events, full of sound logic and most wise con- 
clusions, but he cannot enter into the sympathies, 
comprehend all the minute feelings, prejudices, and 
peculiar ways of thinking which form the idiosyn- 
crasy of the nation. What can he know of these 
who has never been warmed by the same sun, lin- 
gered among the same scenes, listened to the same 
tales in childhood, been pledged to the same inter- 
ests in manhood by which these fancies are nour- 
ished — the loves, the hates, the hopes, the fears, that 
go to form national character? Write as he will, 
he is still an alien, speaking a tongue in which the 
nation will detect the foreign accent. He may pro- 
duce a book without a blemish in the eyes of for- 
eigners ; it may even contain much for the instruc- 
tion of the native that he would not be likely to find 
in his own literature ; but it will afford evidence on 
every page of its exotic origin. Botta's "History of 
the War of the Revolution" is the best treatise yet 
compiled of that event. It is, as every one knows, 
a most classical and able work, doing justice to most 
of the great heroes and actions of the period ; but, 
we will venture to say, no well-informed American 
ever turned over its leaves without feeling that the 
writer was not nourished among the men and the 
scenes he is painting. With all its great merits, it 
cannot be, at least for Americans, the history of the 
Revolution. 

It is the same as in portrait painting. The artist 



310 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

may catch the prominent Uneaments, the complex- 
ion, the general air, the peculiar costume of his sub- 
ject — all that a stranger's eye will demand ; but he 
must not hope, unless he has had much previous in- 
timacy with the sitter, to transfer those fleeting shades 
of expression, the almost imperceptible play of fea- 
tures, which are revealed to the eye of his own family. 
Who would think of looking to a Frenchman for 
a history of England 1 to an Englishman for the 
best history of France 1 111 fares it with the nation 
that cannot find wTiters of genius to tell its own 
story. What foreign hand could have painted, like 
Herodotus and Thucydides, the achievements of the 
Greeks ? Who, like Livy and Tacitus, have por- 
trayed the shifting character of the Roman, in his 
rise, meridian, and decline ? Had the Greeks trust- 
ed their story to these same Romans, what would 
have been their fate with posterity ? Let the Car- 
thaginians tell. All that remains of this nation, the 
proud rival of Rome, who once divided with her 
the empire of the Mediterranean, and surpassed her 
in commerce and civihzation — nearly all that now 
remains to indicate her character, is a poor proverb, 
Punica fides, a brand of infamy given by the Roman 
historian, and one which the Romans merited prob- 
ably as richly as the Carthaginians. Yet America, 
it is too true, must go to Italy for the best history of 
the Revolution, and to Scotland for the best history 
of the Colonies. Happily, the work before us bids 
fair, when completed, to supply this deficiency ; and 
it is quite time we should turn to it. 



BANCROFT S UNITED STATES. 311 

Mr. Bancroft's first two volumes have been too 
long before the public to requhe anything to be now 
said of them. Indeed, the first has already been 
the subject of a particular notice in this Journal. 
These volumes are mainly occupied with the settle- 
ment of the country by the different colonies, and 
the institutions gradually estabhshed among them, 
with a more particular illustration of the remarkable 
features in their character or policy. 

In the present volume the immediate point of 
view is somewhat changed. It was no longer ne- 
cessary to treat each of the colonies separately, and 
a manifest advantage in respect to unity is gained by 
their being brought more under one aspect. A more 
prominent feature is gradually developed by the re- 
lations with the mother country. This is the mer- 
cantile system, as it is called by economical writers, 
which distinguishes the colonial policy of modern 
Europe from that of ancient. The great object of 
this system was to get as much profit from the col- 
onies, with as little cost to the mother country as 
possible. The former, instead of being regarded as 
an integral part of the empire, were held as property, 
to be dealt with for the benefit of the proprietors. 
This was the great object of legislation, almost the 
sole one. The system, so different from anything 
known in antiquity, was introduced by the Span- 
iards and Portuguese, and by them carried to an ex- 
tent which no other nation has cared to follow. By 
the most cruel and absurd system of prohibitory le- 
gislation, their colonies were cut off from intercourse 



312 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

with all but the parent country ; and, as the latter 
was unable to supply their demands for even the 
necessaries of life, an extensive contraband trade 
was introduced, which, without satisfying the wants 
of the colonies, corrupted their morals. It is an old 
story, and the present generation has witnessed the 
results, in the ruin of those fine countries and the 
final assertion of their independence, which the de- 
graded condition in which they have so long been 
held has wholly unfitted them to enjoy. 

The EngHsh government was too wise and liberal 
to press thus heavily on its transatlantic subjects ; 
but the policy was similar, consisting, as is well 
known, and is ably delineated in these volumes, of 
a long series of restrictive measures, tending to 
cramp their free trade, manufactures, and agriculture, 
and to secure the commercial monopoly of Great 
Britain. This is the point from which events in 
the present volume are to be more immediately con- 
templated, all subordinate, like those in the prece- 
ding, to that leading principle of a Republican ten- 
dency — the centre of attraction, controlling the 
movements of the numerous satellites in our colonial 
system. 

The introductory chapter in the volume opens 
with a view of the English Revolution in 1688, 
which, though not popular, is rightly characterized 
as leading the way to popular liberty. Its great ob- 
ject was the security of property ; and our author 
has traced its operation, in connexion with the grad- 
ual progress of commercial wealth, to give greater 



Bancroft's united states. 313 

authority to the mercantile system. We select the 
following original sketch of the character of Wilham 
the Third: 

" The character of the new monarch of Great 
Britain could mould its policy, but not its Constitu- 
tion. True to his purposes, he yet wins no sympa- 
thy. In political sagacity, in force of will, far supe- 
rior to the English statesmen who environed him ; 
more tolerant than his ministers or his Parliaments, 
the childless man seems like the unknown character 
in algebra, which is introduced to form the equation, 
and dismissed when the problem is solved. In his 
person thin and feeble, with eyes of a hectic lustre, 
of a temperament inclining to the melancholic, in 
conduct cautious, of a self-relying humour, with abi- 
ding impressions respecting men, he sought no fa- 
vour, and relied for success on his own inflexibility, 
and the greatness and maturity of his designs. Too 
wise to be cajoled, too firm to be complaisant, no 
address could sway his resolve. In Holland he had 
not scrupled to derive an increased power from the 
crimes of rioters and assassins ; in England, no fihal 
respect diminished the energy of his ambition. His 
exterior was chilling ; yet he had a passionate de- 
light in horses and the chase. In conversation he 
was abrupt, speaking little and slowly, and with re- 
pulsive dryness ; in the day of battle he was all ac- 
tivity, and the highest energy of life, without kin- 
dling his passions, animated his frame. His trust in 
Providence was so connected with faith in general 
laws, that in every action he sought the principle 

Rr 



314 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

which should range it on an absolute decree. Thus, 
unconscious to himself, he had sympathy with the 
people, who always have faith in Providence. ' Do 
you dread death in my company V he cried to the 
anxious sailors, when the ice on the coast of Hol- 
land had almost crushed the boat that was bearing 
him to the shore. Courage and pride pervaded the 
reserve of the prince, who spurning an alhance with 
a bastard daughter of Louis XIV., had made himself 
the centre of a gigantic opposition to France. For 
England, for the English people, for Enghsh liber- 
ties, he had no affection, indifferently employing the 
Whigs, who found their pride in the Revolution, 
and the Tories, who had opposed his elevation, and 
who yet were the fittest instruments 'to carry the 
prerogative high.' One great passion had absorbed 
his breast — the independence of his native country. 
The harsh encroachments of Louis XIV., which in 
1672 had made William of Orange a Revolutionary 
stadtholder, now assisted to constitute him a Revo- 
lutionary king, transforming the impassive champion 
of Dutch independence into the defender of the lib- 
erties of Europe." — Vol. iii., p. 2-4. 

The chapter proceeds to examine the relations, 
not always of the most friendly aspect, between 
England and the colonies, in which Mr. Bancroft 
pays a well-merited tribute to the enlightened policy 
of Penn, and the tranquillity he secured to his settle- 
ment. At the close of the chapter is an account of 
that lamentable — farce, we should have called it, had 
it not so tragic a conclusion — the Salem witchcraft. 



Bancroft's united states. 315 

Our author has presented some very striking 
sketches of these deplorable scenes, in which poor 
human nature appears in as humiliating a plight as 
would be possible in a civihzed country. The In- 
quisition, fierce as it was, and most unrelenting in 
its persecutions, had something in it respectable in 
comparison with this wretched and imbecile self- 
delusion. The historian does not shrink from dis- 
tributing his censure, in full measure, to those to 
whom he thinks it belongs. The erudite divine, 
Cotton Mather, in particular, would feel little pleas- 
ure in the contemplation of the portrait sketched for 
him on this occasion. Vanity, according to Mr. 
Bancroft, was quite as active an incentive to his 
movements as religious zeal ; and, if he began 
with the latter, there seems no reason to doubt that 
pride of opinion, an unwillingness to expose his 
error, so humiliating to the world, perhaps even to 
his own heart, were powerful stimulants to his con- 
tinuing the course he had begun, though others fal- 
tered in it. 

Mr. Bancroft has taken some pains to show that 
the prosecutions were conducted before magistrates 
not appointed by the people, but the crown; and 
that a stop was not put to them till after the meet- 
ing of the representatives of the people. This, in 
our view, is a distinction somewhat fanciful. The 
judges held their commissions from the governor; 
and if he was appointed by the crown, it was, as 
our author admits, at the suggestion of Increase 
Mather, a minister of the people. The accusers, 



316 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the witnesses, the jurors, were all taken from the 
people. And when a stop was put to farther pro- 
ceedings by the seasonable delay interposed by the 
General Court, before the assembling of the " legal 
colonial" tribunal (thus giving time for the illusion 
to subside), it was, in part, from the apprehension 
that, in the rising tide of accusation, no man, how- 
ever elevated might be his character or condition, 
would be safe. 

In the following chapter, after a full exposition 
of the prominent features in the system of commercial 
monopoly which controlled the affairs of the colo- 
nies, we are introduced to the great discoveries in 
the northern and western regions of the continent, 
made by the Jesuit missionaries of France. No- 
thing is more extraordinary in the history of this re- 
markable order than their bold enterprise in spread- 
ing their faith over this boundless wilderness, in 
defiance of the most appalling obstacles which man 
and nature could present. Faith and zeal triumph- 
ed over all, and, combined with science and the 
spirit of adventure, laid open unknown regions in 
the heart of this vast continent, then roamed over 
by the buffalo and the savage, and now alive with 
the busy hum of an industrious and civihzed popu- 
lation. 

The- historian has diligently traced the progress 
of the missionaries in their journeys into the west- 
ern territory of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, down 
the deep basin of the Mississippi to its mouth. He 
has identified the scenes of some striking events in 



Bancroft's united states. 317 

the history of discovery, as, among others, the place 
where Marquette first met the Ilhnois tribe, at Iowa. 
No preceding writer has brought into view the re- 
suks of these labours in a compass which may be 
embraced, as it were, in a single glance. The 
character of this order, and their fortune, form one 
of the most remarkable objects for contemplation in 
the history of man. Springing up, as it were, to 
prop the crumbling edifice of Catholicism when it 
was reeling under the first shock of the Reforma- 
tion, it took up its residence, indifferently, within 
the precincts of palaces, or in the boundless plains 
and forests of the wilderness ; held the consciences 
of civilized monarchs in its keeping, and directed 
their counsels, while, at the same time, it was gath- 
ering barbarian nations under its banners, and pour- 
ing the fight of civilization into the farthest and 
darkest quarters of the globe. 

" The estabUshment of ' the Society of Jesus/ " 
says Mr. Bancroft, "by Loyola had been contem- 
porary with the Reformation, of which it was de- 
signed to arrest the progress, and its complete or- 
ganization belongs to the period when the first full 
edition of Calvin's 'Institutes' saw the light. Its 
members were, by its rules, never to become prelates, 
and could gain power and distinction only by influ- 
ence over mind. Their vows were poverty, chas- 
tity, absolute obedience, and a constant readiness to 
go on missions against heresy or heathenism. Their 
cloisters became the best schools in the world. 
Emancipated, in a great degree, from the forms of 



318 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

piety, separated from domestic ties, constituting a 
community essentially intellectual as well as essen- 
tially plebeian, bound together by the most perfect 
organization, and having for their end a control 
over opinion among the scholars and courts of Eu- 
rope, and throughout the habitable globe, the order 
of the Jesuits held as its ruling maxims the widest dif- 
fusion of its influence, and the closest internal unity. 
Immediately on its institution, their missionaries, 
kindling with a heroism that defied every danger 
and endured every toil, made their way to the ends 
of the earth ; they raised the emblem of man s sal- 
vation on the Moluccas, in Japan, in India, in Thi- 
bet, in Cochin China, and in China ; they penetra- 
ted Ethiopia, and reached the Abyssinians ; they 
planted missions among the Caffres : in California, 
on the banks of the Maranhon, in the plains of Par- 
aguay, they invited the wildest of barbarians to the 
civihzation of Christianity." 

" Rehgious enthusiasm," he adds, " colonized New- 
England ; and religious enthusiasm, founded Mont- 
real, made a conquest of the wilderness on the upper 
Lakes, and explored the Mississippi. Puritanism 
gave New-England its worship and its schools ; the 
Roman Church created for Canada its altars, its 
hospitals, and its seminaries. The influence of 
Calvin can be traced to every New-England village; 
in Canada, the monuments of feudalism and the 
Cathohc Church stand side by side ; and the names 
of Montmorenci and Bourbon, of Levi and Conde, 
are mingled with memorials of St. Athanasius and 



BANCROFT S UNITED STATES. 319 

Augustirs, of St. Francis of Assisi, and Ignatius Lo- 
yola."— iZ^i^., p. 120, 121. 

We hardly know which to select from the many 
brilUant and spirited sketches in which this part of 
the story abounds. None has more interest, on the 
whole, than the discovery of the Mississippi by Mar- 
quette and his companions, and the first voyage of 
the white men down its majestic waters. 

" Behold, then, in 1673, on the tenth day of June, 
the meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious 
Marquette, with Joliet for his associate, five French- 
men as his companions, and two Algonquins as 
guides, lifting their two canoes on their backs, and 
walking across the narrow portage that divides the 
Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reach the 
water-shed ; uttering a special prayer to the immac- 
ulate Virgin, they leave the streams that, flowing 
onward, could have borne their greetings to the 
Castle of Cluebec ; already they stand by the Wis- 
consin. ' The guides returned,' says the gentle 
Marquette, ' leaving us alone in this unknown land, 
in the hands of Providence.' France and Christian- 
ity stood in the Valley of the Mississippi. Embark- 
ing on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers, as they 
sailed west, went solitarily down the stream, between 
alternate prairies and hill-sides, beholding neither 
man nor the wonted beasts of the forest : no sound 
broke the appalling silence but the ripple of their 
canoe and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven 
days 'they entered happily the Great River, with 
a joy that could not be expressed ;' and the two birch- 



320 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

bark canoes, raising their happy sails under new 
skies and to unknown breezes, floated gently down 
the calm magnificence of the ocean stream, over the 
broad, clear sandbars, the resort of innumerable 
water- fowl — gliding past islands that swelled from 
the bosom of the stream, with their tufts of massive 
thickets, and between the wide plains of Illinois and 
Iowa, all garlanded as they were with majestic for- 
ests, or checkered by island grove and the open vast- 
ness of the prairie. 

"About sixty leagues below the mouth of the 
Wisconsin, the western bank of the Mississippi bore 
on its sands the trail of men ; a little footpath was 
discerned leading into a beautiful prairie ; and, leav- 
ing the canoes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone 
to brave a meeting with the savages. After walking 
six miles, they beheld a village on the banks of a 
river, and two others on a slope, at a distance of a 
mile and a half from the first. The river was the 
Mou-in-gou-e-na, or Moingona, of which we have 
corrupted the name into Des Moines. Marquette 
and Joliet were the first white men who trod the 
soil of Iowa. Commending themselves to God, they 
uttered a loud cry. The Indians hear; four old 
men advance slowly to meet them, bearing the 
peace-pipe brilliant with many-coloured plumes. 
' We are Illinois,' said they ; that is, when transla- 
ted, ' We are men ;' and they offered the calumet. 
An aged chief received them at his cabin with up- 
raised hands, exclaiming, ' How beautiful is the sun, 
Frenchmen, when thou comest to visit us! Our 



Bancroft's united states. 321 

whole village awaits thee ; thou shalt enter in peace 
into all our dwellings.' And the pilgrims were fol- 
lowed by the devouring gaze of an astonished crowed. 

"At the great council, Marquette published to 
them the one true God, their creator. He spoke, 
also, of the great captain of the French, the Gov- 
ernor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Na- 
tions and commanded peace ; and he questioned 
them respecting the Mississippi and the tribes that 
possessed its banks. For the messengers who an- 
nounced the subjection of the Iroquois, a magnificent 
festival was prepared of hominy, and fish, and the 
choicest viands from the prairies. 

" After six days' delay, and invitations to new 
visits, the chieftain of the tribe, with hundreds of 
warriors, attended the strangers to their canoes; and, 
selecting a peace-pipe embellished with the head 
and neck of brilliant birds, and all feathered over 
with plumage of various hues, they hung around 
Marquette the mysterious arbiter of peace and war, 
the sacred calumet, a safeguard among the nations. 

The little group proceeded onward. 'I did not 
fear death,' says Marquette ; ' I should have esteem- 
ed it the greatest happiness to have died for the 
glory of God.' They passed the perpendicular 
rocks, which wore the appearance of monsters ; they 
heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the 
Missouri, known to them by the Algonquin name 
of Pekitanoni; and when they came to the most 
beautiful confluence of waters in the world — where 
the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the 

Ss 



322 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to 
the sea — the good Marquette resolved in his heart, 
anticipating Lewis and Clarke, one day to ascend 
the mighty river to its source ; to cross the ridge 
that divides the oceans, and, descending a westerly 
flowing stream, to publish the Gospel to all the 
people of this New World. 

"In a little less than forty leagues, the canoes 
floated past the Ohio, which was then, and long af- 
terward, called the Wabash. Its banks were tenant- 
ed by numerous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, 
who quailed under the incursions of the Iroquois. 

" The thick canes begin to appear so close and 
strong that the buflalo could not break through 
them ; the insects become intolerable ; as a shelter 
against the suns of July, the sails are folded into an 
awning. The prairies vanish ; thick forests of 
whitewood, admirable for their vastness and height, 
crowd even to the skirts of the pebbly shore. It is 
also observed that, in the land of the Chickasas, the 
Indians have guns. 

" Near the latitude of thirty-three degrees, on the 
western bank of the Mississippi, stood the village of 
Mitchigamea, in a region that had not been visited 
by Europeans since the days of De Soto. * Now,* 
thought Marquette, ' we must indeed ask the aid of 
the Virgin.' Armed with bows and arrows, with 
clubs, axes, and bucklers, amid continual whoops, 
the natives, bent on war, embark in vast canoes 
made out of the trunks of hollow trees ; but, at the 
sight of the mysterious peace-pipe held aloft, God 



BANCROFT S UNITED STATES. 323 

touched the hearts of the old men, who checked the 
impetuosity of the young, and, throwing their bows 
and quivers into the canoes as a token of peace, 
they prepared a hospitable welcome. 

" The next day, a long wooden canoe, containing 
ten men, escorted the discoverers, for eight or ten 
leagues, to the village of Akansea, the Hmit of their 
voyage. They had left the region of the Algon- 
qnins, and, in the midst of the Sioux and Chicasas, 
could speak only by an interpreter. A half league 
above Akansea they were met by two boats, in one 
of which stood the commander, holding in his hand 
the peace-pipe, and singing as he drew near. After 
offering the pipe, he gave bread of maize. The 
wealth of his tribe consisted in buffalo-skins ; their 
weapons were axes of steel — a proof of commerce 
with Europeans. 

" Thus had our travellers descended below the 
entrance of the Arkansas, to the genial climes that 
have almost no winter but rains, beyond the bound 
of the Huron and Algonquin languages, to the vicin- 
ity of the Gulf of Mexico, and to tribes of Indians 
that had obtained European arms by traffic with 
Spaniards or with Virginia. 

"So, having spoken of God and the mysteries of 
the Catholic faith ; having become certain that the 
Father of Rivers went not to the ocean east of Flor- 
da, nor yet to the Gulf of California, Marquette and 
JoHet left Akansea and ascended the Mississippi. 

"At the thirty-eighth degree of latitude they en- 
tered the River Ilhnois, and discovered a country 



324 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

without its paragon for the fertility of its beautiful 
prairies, covered with buffaloes and stags ; for the 
loveliness of its rivulets, and the prodigal abundance 
of wild duck and swans, and of a species of parrots 
and wild turkeys. The tribe of Ilhnois, that tenant- 
ed it« banks, entreated Marquette to come and reside 
among them. One of their chiefs, with their young 
men, conducted the party, by w^ay of Chicago, to 
Lake Michigan ; and, before the end of September, 
all were safe in Green Bay. 

" Joliet returned to Quebec to announce the dis- 
covery, of which the fame, through Talon, quicken- 
ed the ambition of Colbert; the unaspiring Mar- 
quette remained to preach the Gospel to the Miamis, 
who dwelt in the north of Illinois, round Chicago. 
Two years afterward, sailing from Chicago to Mack- 
inaw, he entered a little river in Michigan. Erect- 
ing an altar, he said mass after the rites of the Cath- 
olic Church ; then, begging the men who conducted 
his canoe to leave him alone for half an hour 

'in the darkling wood, 
Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, 
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks 
And supplication.' 

At the end of the half hour they went to seek him, 
and he was no more. The good missionary, discov- 
erer of a world, had fallen asleep on the margin of 
the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth the 
canoe-men dug his grave in the sand. Ever after, 
the forest rangers, if in danger on Lake Michigan, 
would invoke his name. The people of the West 
will build his monument." — Ihid., p. 157, 162. 



Bancroft's united states. 325 

The list of heroic adventurers in the path of dis- 
covery is closed by La Salle, the chivalrous French- 
man of whom v\^e have made particular record in a 
previous number of this Journal,* and whose tremen- 
dous journey from the Illinois to the French settle- 
ments in Canada, a distance of fifteen hundred miles, 
is also noticed by Mr. Bancroft. His was the first 
European bark that emerged from the mouth of the 
Mississippi ; and Mr. Bancroft, as he notices the 
event, and the feelings it gave rise to in the mind of 
the discoverer, gives utterance to his own in language 
truly sublime : 

" As he raised the cross by the Arkansas — as he 
planted the arms of France near the Gulf of Mexi- 
co, he anticipated the future affluence of emigrants, 
and heard in the distance the footsteps of the ad- 
vancing multitude that were coming to take posses- 
sion of the valley." — Ihid., p. 168. 

This descent of the Great River our author pla- 
ces, without hesitation, in 1682, being a year earlier 
than the one assigned by us in the article referred 
to.f Mr. Bancroft is so familiar with the whole 
ground, and has studied the subject so carefully, that 
great weight is due to his opinions ; but he has not 
explained the precise authority for his conclusions 
in this particular. 

This leads us to enlarge on what we consider a 
defect in our author's present plan. His notes are 
discarded altogether, and his references transferred 

* See "North American Review," vol. xlviii., p. 69, et seq. 
t Ibid., p. 84, 85. 



326 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

from the bottom of the page to the side margin. 
This is very objectionable, not merely on accomit 
of the disagreeable effect produced on the eye, but 
from the more serious inconvenience ofwantof room 
for very frequent and accurate reference. Titles are 
necessarily much abridged, sometimes at the expense 
of perspicuity. The first reference in this volume 
is "Hallam, iv., 374;" the second is "Archdale.'* 
Now Hallam has w^ritten several works, published 
in various forms and editions. As to the second 
authority, we have no means of identifying the pas- 
sage at all. This, however, is not the habit of Mr. 
Bancroft where the fact is of any great moment, and 
his references throughout are abundant. But the 
practice of references in the side margin, though 
warranted by high authority, is unfavourable, from 
want of room, for very frequent or very minute spe- 
cification. 

The omission of notes we consider a still greater 
evil. It is true, they lead to great abuses, are often 
the vehicle of matter which should have been incor- 
porated in the text, more frequently of irrelevant 
matter which should not have been admitted any- 
where, and thus exhaust the reader's patience, while 
they spoil the effect of the work by drawing the at- 
tention from the continuous flow of the narrative, 
checking the heat that is raised by it in the reader's 
mind, and not unfrequently jarring on his feehngs 
by some misplaced witticism, or smart attempt at 
one. For these and the Hke reasons, many compe- 
tent critics have pronounced against the use of notes. 



Bancroft's united states. 327 

considering that a writer who could not bring all he 
had to say into the compass of his text was a bun- 
gler. Gibbon, who practised the contrary, intimates 
a regret in one of his letters that he had been over- 
ruled so far as to allow his notes to be printed at 
the bottom of the page instead of being removed to 
the end of the volume. But from all this we dissent, 
especially in reference to a work of research like the 
present History. We are often desirous here to 
have the assertion of the author, or the sentiment 
quoted by him, if important, verified by the original 
extract, especially when this is in a foreign language. 
We want to see the grounds of his conclusions, the 
scaffolding by which he has raised his structure ; to 
estimate the true value of his authorities ; to know 
something of their characters, positions in society, 
and the probable influences to which they were ex- 
posed. Where there is contradiction, we want to 
see it stated ; the pros and the cons, and the grounds 
for rejecting this and admitting that. We want to 
have a reason for our faith, otherwise we are merely 
led blindfold. Our guide may be an excellent guide ; 
he may have travelled over the path till it has be- 
come a beaten track to him ; but we like to use our 
own eyesight too, to observe somewhat for ourselves, 
and to know% if possible, why he has taken this par- 
ticular road in preference to that which his prede- 
cessors have travelled. 

The objections made to notes are founded rather 
on the abuse than the proper use of them. Gibbon 
only wished to remove his own to the end of his 



328 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

volume ; though in this we think he erred, from 
the difficulty and frequent disappointment which the 
reader must have experienced in consulting them — 
♦ a disappointment of little moment when unattended 
•by difficulty. But Gibbon knew too well the worth 
of this part of his labours to him to wish to discard 
them altogether. He knew his reputation stood on 
them as intimately as on his narrative. Indeed, 
they supply a body of criticism, and well-selected, 
well-digested learning, which of itself would make 
the reputation of any scholar. Many accomplished 
writers, however, and Mr. Bancroft among the num- 
ber, have come to a different conclusion ; and he 
has formed his, probably, with deliberation, having 
made the experiment in both forms. 

It is true, the fulness of the extracts from original 
sources with which his text is inlaid, giving such 
life and presence to it, and the frequency of his ref- 
erences, supersede much of the necessity of notes. 
We should have been very glad of one, however, of 
the kind we are speaking of, at the close of his ex- 
pedition of La Salle. 

We have no room for the discussion of the topics 
in the next chapter, relating to the hostilities for the 
acquisition of colonial territory between France and 
England, each of them pledged to the same system 
of commercial monopoly, but must pass to the au- 
thor's account of the Aborigines east of the Missis- 
sippi. In this division of his subject he brings into 
view the geographical positions of the numerous 
tribes, their languages, social institutions, religious 



BANCROFT S UNITED STATES. 329 

faith, and probable origin. All these copious topics 
are brought within the compass of a hundred pages ; 
arranged with great harmony, and exhibited with 
perspicuity and singular richness of expression. It 
is, on the whole, the most elaborate and finished 
portion of the volume. 

His remarks on the localities of the tribes, instead 
of a barren muster-roll of names, are constantly en- 
livened by picturesque details connected with their 
situation. His strictures on their various languages 
are conceived in a philosophical spirit. The subject 
is one that has already employed the pens of the 
ablest philologists in this country, among whom it is 
only necessary to mention the names of Du Pon- 
ceau, Pickering, and Gallatin. Our author has evi- 
dently bestowed much labour and thought on the 
topic. He examines the pecuUar structure of the 
languages, which, though radically different, bear a 
common resemblance in their compounded and syn- 
thetic organization. He has omitted to notice the 
singular exception to the poly synthetic formation of 
the Indian languages presented by the Otomie, 
which has afforded a Mexican philologist so ingeni- 
ous a parallel, in its structure, with the Chinese. Mr. 
Bancroft concludes his review of them by admitting 
the copiousness of their combinations, and by infer- 
ring that this copiousness is no evidence of care and 
cultivation, but the elementary form of expression of 
a rude and uncivihzed people ; in proof of which, he 
cites the example of the partially civilized Indian in 
accommodating his idiom gradually to the analytic 

Tt 



330 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Structure of the European languages. May not this 
be explained by the circumstance that the influence 
under which he makes this, like his other changes, 
is itself European ? But we pass to a more popular 
theme, the rehgious faith of the red man, whose fan- 
ciful superstitions are depicted by our author with 
highly poetical colouring. 

" The red man, unaccustomed to generalization, 
obtained no conception of an absolute substance, of 
a self-existent being, but saw a divinity in every 
power. Wherever there was being, motion, or ac- 
tion, there to him was a spirit ; and, in a special 
manner, wherever there appeared singular excellence 
among beasts, or birds, or in the creation, there to 
him was the presence of a divinity. When he feels 
his pulse throb or his heart beat, he knows that it 
is a spirit. A god resides in the flint, to give forth 
the kindling, cheering fire ; a spirit resides in the 
mountain clifl"; a spirit makes its abode in the cool 
recesses of the grottoes which nature has adorned ; 
a god dwells in each 'little grass' that springs mi- 
raculously from the earth. ' The woods, the wilds, 
and the waters respond to savage intelligence ; the 
stars and the mountains live ; the river, and the lake, 
and the waves have a spirit.' Every hidden agen- 
cy, every mysterious influence, is personified. A 
god dwells in the sun, and in the moon, and in the 
firmament ; the spirit of the morning reddens in the 
eastern sky ; a deity is present in the ocean and in 
the fire; the crag that overhangs the river has its 
genius; there is a spirit to the waterfall; a house- 



Bancroft's united states. 331 

hold god dwells in the Indian's wigwam, and conse- 
crates his home ; spirits climb upon the forehead to 
weigh down the eyelids in sleep. Not the heaven- 
ly bodies only, the sky is filled with spirits that min- 
ister to man. To the savage, divinity, broken, as it 
were, into an infinite number of fragments, fills all 
place and all being. The idea of unity in the crea- 
tion may exist contemporaneously, but it existed 
only in the germ, or as a vague belief derived from 
the harmony of the universe. Yet faith in the Great 
Spirit, when once presented, was promptly seized 
and appropriated, and so infused itself into the heart 
of remotest tribes, that it came to be often consider- 
ed as a portion of their original faith. Their shad- 
owy aspirations and creeds assumed, through the re- 
ports of missionaries, a more complete development, 
and a religious system was elicited from the preg- 
nant but rude materials." — Ibid., p. 285, 286. 

The following pictures of the fate of the Indian 
infant, and the shadowy pleasures of the land of 
spirits, have also much tenderness and beauty : 

" The same motive prompted them to bury with 
the warrior his pipe and his manitou, his tomahawk, 
quiver, and bow ready bent for action, and his most 
splendid apparel ; to place by his side his bowl, his 
maize, and his venison, for the long journey to the 
country of his ancestors. Festivals in honour of 
the dead were also frequent, when a part of the food 
was given to the flames, that so it might serve to 
nourish the departed. The traveller would find in 
the forests a dead body placed on a scaffold erected 



332 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

upon piles, carefully wrapped in bark for its shroud, 
and attired in warmest furs. If a mother lost her 
babe, she would cover it with bark, and envelop it 
anxiously in the softest beaver-skins ; at the burial- 
place she would put by its side its cradle, its beads, 
and its rattles; and, as a last service of maternal 
love, would draw milk from her bosom in a cup of 
bark, and burn it in the fire, that her infant might still 
find nourishment on its solitary journey to the land 
of shades. Yet the newborn babe would be buried, 
not, as usual, on a scaffold, but by the wayside, that 
so its spirit might secretly steal into the bosom of 
some passing matron, and be born again under hap- 
pier auspices. On burying her daughter, the Chip- 
pewa mother adds, not snow-shoes, and beads, and 
moccasins only, but (sad emblem of woman's lot in 
the wilderness !) the carrying-belt and the paddle. 
'I know my daughter will be restored to me,' she 
once said, as she clipped a lock of hair as a memo- 
rial ; ' by this lock of hair I shall discover her, for I 
shall take it with me ;' alluding to the day when 
she too, with her carrying-belt and paddle, and the 
little relic of her child, should pass through the grave 
to the dweUing-place of her ancestors." 

" The faith, as well as the sympathies of the sav- 
age, descended also to inferior things. Of each kind 
of animal they say there exists one, the source and 
origin of all, of a vast size, the type and original of 
the whole class. From the immense invisible bea- 
ver come all the beavers, by whatever run of water 
they are found ; the same is true of the elk and buf- 



Bancroft's united states. 333 

falo, of the eagle and robin, of the meanest quadru- 
ped of the forest, of the smallest insect that buzzes 
in the air. There lives for each class of animals 
this invisible, vast type, or elder brother. Thus the 
savage established his right to be classed by philoso- 
phers in the rank of Realists, and his chief effort at 
generalization was a reverent exercise of the rehgious 
sentiment. Where these older brothers dwell they 
do not exactly know ; yet it may be that the giant 
manitous, which are brothers to beasts, are hid be- 
neath the waters, and that those of the birds make 
their homes in the blue sky. But the Indian be- 
lieves also, of each individual animal, that it possess- 
es the mysterious, the indestructible principle of 
life ; there is not a breathing thing but has its shade, 
which never can perish. Regarding himself, in com- 
parison with other animals, but as the first among 
co-ordinate existences, he respects the brute creation, 
and assigns to it, as to himself, a perpetuity of being. 
* The ancients of these lands beheved that the war- 
rior, when released from life, renews the passions and 
activity of this world ; is seated once more among 
his friends ; shares again the joyous feast ; walks 
through shadowy forests, that are alive with the spir- 
its of birds ; and there, in his paradise, 

" ' By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
In vestments for the chase arrayed, 
The hunter still the deer pursues — 
The hunter and the deer a shade.' " 

Ibid., p. 295, 298. 

At the close of this chapter the historian grapples 
with the much-vexed question respecting the origin 



334 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of the Aborigines — that jpons asinorum which has 
called forth so much sense and nonsense on both 
sides of the water, and will continue to do so as 
long as a new relic or unknown hieroglyphic shall 
turn up to irritate the nerves of the antiquary. 
N Mr. Bancroft passes briefly in review the several 
arguments adduced in favour of the connexion with 
Eastern Asia. He lays no stress on the affinity of 
languages, or of customs and religious notions, con- 
sidering these as spontaneous expressions of similar 
ideas and wants in similar conditions of society. 
He attaches as little value to the resemblance estab- 
lished by Humboldt between the signs of the Mex- 
ican calendar and those of the signs of the zodiac in 
Thibet and Tartary ; and as for the far-famed Digh- 
ton Rock, and the learned lucubrations thereon, he 
sets them down as so much moonshine, pronouncing 
the characters Algonquin. The tumuli — the great 
tumuli of the West — he regards as the work of no 
mortal hand, except so far as they have been exca- 
vated for a sepulchral purpose. He admits, howev- 
er, vestiges of a migratory movement on our conti- 
nent, from the northeast to the southwest ; shows 
very satisfactorily, by estimating the distances of the 
intervening islands, the practicability of a passage in 
the most ordinary sea-boat from the Asiatic to the 
American shores in the high latitudes; and, by a 
comparison of the Indian and Mongohan sculls, 
comes to the conclusion that the two races are prob- 
ably identical in origin. But the epoch of their di- 
vergence he places at so remote a period, that the 



Vi 



Bancroft's united states. 335 

peculiar habits, institutions, and culture of the Abo- 
rigines must be regarded as all their own — as indi- 
! genous. This is the outline of his theory. 

By this hypothesis he extricates the question from 
the embarrassment caused by the ignorance which 
the Aborigines have manifested in the use of iron and 
milk, known to the Mongol hordes, but which he, of 
course, supposes were not known at the time of the 
migration. This is carrying the exodus back to a 
far period. But the real objection seems to be that, 
by thus rejecting all evidence of communication but 
that founded on anatomical resemblance, he has un- 
necessarily narrowed the basis on which it rests. 
The resemblance between a few specimens of Mon- 
golian and American sculls is a narrow basis in- 
deed, taken as the only one, for so momentous a 
theory. 

In fact, this particular point of analogy does not 
strike us as by any means the most powerful of the 
arguments in favour of a communication with the 
East, when we consider the small number of the 
specimens on which it is founded, the great variety 
of formation in individuals of the same family — some 
of the specimens approaching even nearer to the 
Caucasian than the Mongolian — and the very uni- 
form deviation from the latter in the prominence and 
the greater angularity of the features. 

This connexion with the East derives, in our judg- 
ment, some support, feeble though it be, from affini- 
ties of language ; but this is a field which remains to 
be much more fully explored. The analogy is much 



336 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

more striking of certain usages and institutions, par- 
ticularly of a religious character, and, above all, the 
mythological traditions which those who have had 
occasion to look into the Aztec antiquities cannot 
fail to be struck with. This resemblance is often- 
times in matters so purely arbitrary, that it can hard- 
ly be regarded as founded in the constitution of man ; 
so very exact that it can scarcely be considered as 
accidental. We give up the Dighton Rock, that 
rock of offence to so many antiquaries, who may 
read in it the hand-writing of the Phoenicians, 
Egyptians, or Scandinavians, quite as well as any- 
thing else. Indeed, the various fac similes of it, 
made for the benefit of the learned, are so different 
from one another, that, like Sir Hudibras, one may 
find in it 

" A leash of languages at once." 

We are agreed with our author that it is very good 
Algonquin. But the zodiac, the Tartar zodiac, 
which M. de Humboldt has so well shown to re- 
semble, in its terms, those of the Aztec calendar, 
we cannot so easily surrender. The striking coin- 
cidence established by his investigations between 
the astronomical signs of the two nations — in a 
similar corresponding series, moreover, although ap- 
plied to different uses — is, in our opinion, one of 
the most powerful arguments yet adduced for the 
affinity of the two races. Nor is Mr. Bancroft 
wholly right in supposing that the Asiatic hiero- 
glyphics referred only to the zodiac. Like the 
Mexican, they also presided over the years, days, 



Bancroft's united states. 337 

and even hours. The strength of evidence, founded 
on numerous analogies, cannot be show^n w^ithout 
going into details, for w^hich there is scarce room in 
the compass of a separate article, much less in the 
heel of one. Whichever way we turn, the subject 
is fall of perplexity. It is the sphinx's riddle, and 
the CEdipus must be called from the grave who is 
to solve it. 

In closing our remarks, we must express our sat- 
isfaction that the favourable notice we took of Mr. 
Bancroft's labours on his first appearance has been 
fully ratified by his countrymen, and that his Colo- 
nial History establishes his title to a place among 
the great historical writers of the age. The reader 
will find the pages of the present volume filled with 
matter not less interesting and important than the 
preceding. He will meet with the same brilliant 
and daring style, the same picturesque sketches of 
character and incident, the same acute reasoning 
and compass of erudition. 

In the delineation of events Mr. Bancroft has 
been guided by the spirit of historic faith. Not that 
it would be difficult to discern the colour of his pol- 
itics ; nor, indeed, would it be possible for any one 
strongly pledged to any set of principles, whether in 
politics or religion, to disguise them in the discussion 
of abstract topics, without being false to himself, and 
giving a false tone to the picture ; but, while he is 
true to himself, he has an equally imperative duty 
to perform — to be true to others, to those on whose 
characters and conduct he sits in judgment as a his- 

Uu 



338 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

torian. No pet theory nor party predilections can 
justify him in swerving one hair's-breadth from truth 
in his deHneation of the mighty dead, whose por- 
traits he is exhibiting to us on the canvass of history. 

Whenever rehgion is introduced, Mr. Bancroft 
has shown a commendable spirit of liberaUty. Cath- 
olics and Calvinists, Jesuits, Quakers, and Church- 
of-England men, are all judged according to their 
deeds, and not their speculative tenets ; and even in 
the latter particular he generally contrives to find 
something deserving of admiration, some commend- 
able doctrine or aspiration in most of them. And 
what Christian sect — we might add, what sect of any 
denomination — is there which has not some beauty 
of doctrine to admire ? Religion is the homage of 
man to his Creator. The forms in which it is ex- 
pressed are infinitely various ; but they flow from 
the same source, are directed to the same end, and 
all claim from the historian the benefit of toleration. 

What Mr. Bancroft has done for the Colonial his- 
tory is, after all, but preparation for a richer theme, 
the history of the War of Independence ; a subject 
which finds its origin in the remote past, its results 
in the infinite future ; which finds a central point of 
unity in the ennobling principle of independence, 
that gives dignity and grandeur to the most petty 
details of the conflict, and which has its foreground 
occupied by a single character, to which all others 
converge as to a centre — the character of Washing- 
ton, in war, in peace, and in private fife the most 
subUme on historical record. Happy the writer who 



Bancroft's united states 339 

shall exhibit this theme worthily to the eyes of his 
countrymen ! 

The subject, it is understood, is to engage the 
attention, also, of Mr. Sparks, whose honourable 
labours have already associated his name imperish- 
ably with our Revolutionary period. Let it not be 
feared that there is not compass enough in the sub- 
ject for two minds so gifted. The field is too rich 
to be exhausted by a single crop, and will yield 
fresh laurels to the skilful hand that shall toil for 
them. The labours of Hume did not supersede 
those of Lingard, or Turner, or Mackintosh, or 
Hallam. The history of the English Revolution 
has called forth, in our own time, the admirable es- 
says of Mackintosh and Guizot ; and the palm of 
excellence, after the libraries that have been written 
on the French Revolution, has just been assigned to 
the dissimilar histories of Mignet and Thiers. The 
points of view under which a thing may be contem- 
plated are as diversified as mind itself The most 
honest inquirers after truth rarely come to precisely 
the same results, such is the influence of education, 
prejudice, principle. Truth, indeed, is single, but 
opinions are infinitely various, and it is only by com- 
paring these opinions together that we can hope to 
ascertain what is truth. 



340 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO.* 

JANUARY, 1843. 

In the present age of high literary activity, trav- 
ellers make not the least importunate demands on 
public attention, and their lucubrations, under what- 
ever name — Rambles, Notices, Incidents, Pencillings 
— are nearly as important a staple for the " trade" as 
novels and romances. A book of travels, formerly, 
v^as a very serious affair. The traveller set out on 
his distant journey with many a solemn preparation, 
made his will, and bade adieu to his friends like one 
who might not again return. If he did return, the 
results were imbodied in a respectable folio, or at 
least quarto, well garnished with cuts, and done up 
in a solid form, which argued that it was no fugitive 
publication, but destined for posterity. 

All this is changed. The voyager nowadays 
leaves home with as little ceremony and leave-ta- 
king as if it were for a morning's drive. He steps 
into the bark that is to carry him across thousands 
of miles of ocean with the moral certainty of re- 
turning in a fixed week, almost at a particular day. 
Parties of gentlemen and ladies go whizzing along 
in their steamships over the track which cost so 
many weary days to the Argonauts of old, and run 
over the choicest scenes of classic antiquity, scatter- 

* " Life in Mexico, during a Residence of Two Years in that Country. 

By Madame C de la B ." Boston : Little and Brown. Two 

volumes, ]2rao. 



MADAME CALDERON's LIFE IN MEXICO. 341 

ed through Europe, Asia, and Africa, in less time 
than it formerly took to go from one end of the Brit- 
ish isles to the other. The Cape of Good Hope, so 
long the great stumbling-block to the navigators of 
Europe, is doubled, or the Red Sea coasted, in the 
same way, by the fashionable tourist — who glides 
along the shores of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Bom- 
bay, and Hindostan, farther than the farthest limits 
of Alexander's conquests — before the last leaves of 
the last new novel which he has taken by the way 
are fairly cut. The facilities of communication 
have, in fact, so abridged distances, that geography, 
as we have hitherto studied it, may be said to be 
entirely reformed. Instead of leagues, we now com- 
pute by hours, and we find ourselves next-door 
neighbours to those whom we had looked upon as 
at the antipodes. 

The consequence of these improvements in the 
means of intercourse is, that all the world goes 
abroad, or, at least, one half is turned upon the oth- 
er. Nations are so mixed up by this process that 
they are in some danger of losing their idiosyncrasy ; 
and the Egyptian and the Turk, though they still 
cling to their religion, are becoming European in 
their notions and habits more and more every day. 

The taste for pilgrimage, however, it must be 
owned, does not stop with the countries where it 
can be carried on with such increased facility. It 
has begotten a nobler spirit of adventure, something 
akin to what existed in the fifteenth century, when 
the world was new, or newly discovering, and a 



342 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

navigator who did not take in sail, like the cautious 
seamen of Knickerbocker, might run down some 
strange continent in the dark ; for, in these times 
of dandy tourists and travel-mongers, the boldest 
achievements, that have hitherto defied the most ad- 
venturous spirits, have been performed : the Him- 
maleh Mountains have been scaled, the Niger as- 
cended, the burning heart of Africa penetrated, the 
icy Arctic and Antarctic explored, and the myste- 
rious monuments of the semi-civilized races of Cen- 
tral America have been thrown open to the public 
gaze. It is certain that this is a high-pressure age, 
and every department of science and letters, phys- 
ical and mental, feels its stimulating influence. 

No nation, on the whole, has contributed so large- 
ly to these itinerant expeditions as the English. 
Uneasy, it would seem, at being cooped up in their 
little isle, they sally forth in all directions, swarming 
over the cultivated and luxurious countries of the 
neighbouring continent, or sending out stragglers on 
other more distant and formidable missions. Wheth- 
er it be that their soaring spirits are impatient of 
the narrow quarters which nature has assigned them, 
or that there exists a supernumerary class of idlers, 
who, wearied with the monotony of home, and the 
same dull round of dissipation, seek excitement in 
strange scenes and adventures ; or whether they go 
abroad for the sunshine, of which they have heard 
so much but seen so little — whatever be the cause, 
they furnish a far greater number of tourists than all 
the world besides. We Americans, indeed, may 



MADAME CALDERON's LIFE IN MEXICO. 34^ 

compete with them in mere locomotion, for our fa- 
miharity with magnificent distances at home makes 
us still more indifferent to them abroad ; but this 
locomotion is generally in the way of business, and 
the result is rarely shown in a book, unless, indeed, 
it be the leger. 

Yet John Bull is, on many accounts, less fitted 
than most of his neighbours for the duties of a trav- 
eller. However warm and hospitable in his own 
home, he has a cold reserve in his exterior, a cer- 
tain chilling atmosphere, which he carries along 
with him, that freezes up the sympathies of stran- 
gers, and which is only to be completely thawed by 
long and intimate acquaintance. But the traveller 
has no time for intimate acquaintances. He must 
go forward, and trust to his first impressions, for 
they will also be his last. Unluckily, it rarely falls 
out that the first impressions of honest John are very 
favourable. There is too much pride, not to say 
hauteur, in his composition, which, with the best in- 
tentions in the world, will show itself in a way not 
particularly flattering to those who come in contact 
with him. He goes through a strange nation, tread- 
ing on all their little irritable prejudices, shocking 
their self-love and harmless vanities — in short, going 
against the grain, and roughing up everything by 
taking it the wrong way. Thus he draws out the 
bad humours of the people among whom he moves, 
sees them in their most unamiable and by no means 
natural aspect — in short, looks on the wrong side 
of the tapestry. What wonder if his notions are 



344 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

somewhat awry as to what he sees ! There are, it 
is true, distinguislied exceptions to all this : English 
travellers, who cover the warm heart — as warm as 
it is generally true and manly — ^under a kind and 
sometimes cordial manner ; but they are the ex- 
ceptions. The Englishman undoubtedly appears 
best on his own soil, where his national predilections 
and prejudices, or, at least, the intimation of theni, 
are somewhat mitigated in deference to his guest. 

Another source of the disqualification of John Bull 
as a calm and philosophic traveller is the manner 
in which he has been educated at home ; the soft 
luxuries by which he has been surrounded from his 
cradle have made luxuries necessaries, and, accus- 
tomed to perceive all the machinery of life glide 
along as noiselessly and as swiftly as the foot of 
Time itself, he becomes morbidly sensitive to every 
temporary jar or derangement in the working of it. 
In no country, since the world was made, have all 
the appliances for mere physical, and, we may add, 
intellectual indulgence, been carried to such perfec- 
tion as in this little island nucleus of civilization. 
Nowhere can a man get such returns for his outlay. 
The whole organization of society is arranged so as 
to minister to the comforts of the wealthy ; and an 
Englishman, with the golden talisman in his pocket, 
can bring about him genii to do his bidding, and 
transport himself over distances with a thought, al- 
most as easy as if he were the possessor of Aladdin's 
magic lamp, and the fairy carpet of the Arabian 
Tales. 



MADAME CALDEROn's LIFE IN MEXICO. 345 

When he journeys over his little island, his com- 
forts and luxuries cling as close to him as round his 
own fireside. He rolls over roads as smooth and 
well-beaten as those in his own park ; is swept on- 
ward by sleek and well-groomed horses, in a carriage 
as soft and elastic, and quite as showy as his own 
equipage ; puts up at inns that may vie with his own 
castle in their comforts and accommodations, and is 
received by crowds of obsequious servants, more so- 
licitous, probably, even than his own to win his gold- 
en smiles. In short, wherever he goes, he may be 
said to carry with him his castle, park, equipage, es- 
tablishment. The whole are in movement together. 
He changes place, indeed, but changes nothing else. 
For traveUingjas it occurs in other lands — hard roads, 
harder beds, and hardest fare — he knows no more 
of it than if he had been passing from one wing of 
his castle to the other. 

All this, it must be admitted, is rather an indiffer- 
ent preparation for a tour on the Continent. Of 
what avail is it that Paris is the most elegant capital, 
France the most enlightened country on the Euro- 
pean terra jirma, if one cannot walk in the streets 
without the risk of being run over for want of a 
trottoir, nor move on the roads without being half 
smothered in a lumbering vehicle, dragged by ropes, 
at the rate of five miles an hour ? Of what account 
are the fine music and paintings, the architecture 
and art of Italy, when one must shiver by day for 
want of carpets and seacoal fires, and be thrown 
into a fever at night by the active vexations of a still 

Xx 



346 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

more tormenting kind ? The galled equestrian might 
as well be expected to feel nothing but raptures and 
ravishment at the fine scenery through which he is 
riding. It is probable he will think much more of 
his own petty hurts than of the beauties of nature. 
A travelling John Bull, if his skin is not off, is at 
least so thin-skinned that it is next door to being so. 
If the European neighbourhood affords so many 
means of annoyance to the British traveller, they are 
incalculably multiplied on this side of the water, and 
that, too, under circumstances which dispose him still 
less to charity in his criticisms and constructions. 
On the Continent he feels he is among strange races, 
born and bred under different rehgious and political 
institutions, and, above all, speaking different lan- 
guages. He does not necessarily, therefore, measure 
them by his peculiar standard, but allows them one 
of their own. The dissimilarity is so great in all the 
main features of national polity and society, that it 
is hard to institute a comparison. Whatever be his 
contempt for the want of progress and perfection in 
the science of living, he comes to regard them as a 
distinct race, amenable to different laws, and there- 
fore licensed to indulge in different usages, to a cer- 
tain extent, from his own. If a man travels in China, 
he makes up his mind to chop-sticks. If he should 
go to the moon, he would not be scandalized by see- 
ing people walk with their heads under their arms. 
He has embarked on a different planet. It is only 
in things which run parallel to those in his own 
country that a comparison can be instituted, and 
charity too often fails where criticism begins. 



MADAME CALDEROn's LIFE IN MEXICO. 347 

Unhappily, in America, the Enghshman finds these 
points of comparison forced on him at every step. 
He lands among a people speaking the same lan- 
guage, professing the same religion, drinking at the 
same fountains of literature, trained in the same oc- 
cupations of active hfe. The towns are built on 
much the same model with those in his own land. 
The brick houses, the streets, the " sidewalks," the 
in-door arrangements, all, in short, are near enough 
on the same pattern to provoke a comparison. Alas! 
for the comparison. The cities sink at once into 
mere provincial towns, the language degenerates into 
a provincial ^a^o^X the manners, the fashions, down 
to the cut of the clothes, and the equipages, all are 
provincial. The people, the whole nation — as in- 
dependent as any, certainly, if not, as our orators 
fondly descant, the best and most enlightened upon 
earth — dwindle into a mere British colony. The 
traveller does not seem to understand that he is 
treading the soil of the New World, where every- 
thing is new, where antiquity dates but from yester- 
day, where the present and the future are all, and 
the past nothing, where hope is the watchword, and 
" Go ahead !" the principle of action. He does not 
comprehend that when he sets foot on such a land, 
he is no longer to look for old hereditary landmarks, 
old time-honoured monuments and institutions, old 
families that have vegetated on the same soil since 
the Conquest. He must be content to part with the 
order and something of the decorum incident to an 
old community, where the ranks are all precisely 



348 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

and punctiliously defined, where the power is de- 
posited by prescriptive right in certain privileged 
hands, and where the great mass have the careful 
obsequiousness of dependants, looking for the crumbs 
that fall. 

He is now among a new people, w^here everything 
is in movement, all struggling to get forward, and 
where, though many go adrift in their wild spirit of 
adventure, and a temporary check may be sometimes 
felt by all, the great mass still advances. He is land- 
ed on a hemisphere where fortunes are to be made, 
and men are employed in getting, not in spending — 
a difference which explains so many of the discrep- 
ancies between the structure of our own society and 
habits and those of the Old World. To know how 
to spend is itself a science ; and the science of spend- 
ing and that of getting are rarely held by the same 
hand. 

In such a state of things, the whole arrangement 
of society, notwithstanding the apparent resemblance 
to that in his own country, and its real resemblance 
in minor points, is reversed. The rich proprietor, 
who does nothing but fatten on his rents, is no long- 
er at the head of the scale, as in the Old World. 
The man of enterprise takes the lead in a bustling 
community, where action and progress, or at least 
change, are the very conditions of existence. The 
upper classes — if the term can be used in a complete 
democracy — have not the luxurious finish and ac- 
commodations to be found in the other hemisphere. 
The humbler classes have not the poverty-stricken, 



MADAME CALDERON's LIFE IN MEXICO. 349 

cringing spirit of hopeless inferiority. The pillar of 
society, if it want the Corinthian capital, wants also 
the heavy and superfluous base. Every man not 
only professes to be, but is practically, on a footing 
of equality with his neighbour. The traveller must 
not expect to meet here the deference, or even the 
courtesies which grow out of distinction of castes. 
This is an awkward dilemma for one whose nerves 
have never been jarred by contact with the profane; 
who has never been tossed about in the rough and 
tumble of humanity. It is little to him that the poor- 
est child in the community learns how to read and 
write ; that the poorest man can have — what Henry 
the Fourth so good-naturedly wished for the hum- 
blest of his subjects — a fowl in his pot every day for 
his dinner ; that no one is so low but that he may 
aspire to all the rights of his fellow-men, and find an 
open theatre on which to display his own peculiar 
talents. 

As the tourist strikes into the interior, difficulties 
of all sorts multiply, incident to a raw and unformed 
country. The comparison with the high civilization 
at home becomes more and more unfavourable, as he 
is made to feel that in this land of promise it must 
be long before promise can become the performance 
of the Old World. And yet, if he would look be- 
yond the surface, he would see that much here too 
has been performed, however much may be wanting. 
He would see lands over which the wild Indian 
roamed as a hunting-ground, teeming with harvests 
for the consumption of milhons at home and abroad; 



350 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

forests, which have shot up, ripened, and decayed on 
the same spot ever since the creation, now swept 
away to make room for towns and villages, thronged 
with an industrious population ; rivers, which rolled 
on in their solitudes, undisturbed except by the wan- 
dering bark of the savage, now broken and dimpled 
by hundreds of steamboats, freighted with the rich 
tribute of a country rescued from the wilderness. 
He would not expect to meet the careful courtesies 
of pohshed society in the pioneers of civilization, 
whose mission has been to recover the great conti- 
nent from the bear and the buffalo. He would have 
some charity for their ignorance of the latest fash- 
ions of Bond-street, and their departure, sometimes, 
even from what, in the Old Country, is considered as 
the decorum, and, it may be, decencies of life. But 
not so ; his heart turns back to his own land, and 
closes against the rude scenes around him ; for he 
finds here none of the soft graces of cultivation, or 
the hallowed memorials of an early civilization ; no 
gray, weather-beaten cathedrals, telling of the Nor- 
mans ; no Gothic churches in their groves of vener- 
able oaks ; no moss-covered cemeteries, in which the 
dust of his fathers has been gathered since the time 
of the Plantagenets ; no rural cottages, half smoth- 
ered with roses and honeysuckles, intimating that 
even in the most humble abodes the taste for the 
beautiful has found its way; no trim gardens, and 
fields blossoming with hawthorn hedges and minia- 
ture culture ; no ring fences, enclosing well-shaven 
lawns, woods so disposed as to form a picture of 



MADAME CALDEROn's LIFE IN MEXICO. 351 

themselves, bright threads of silvery water, and 
sparkling fountains. All these are wanting, and his 
eyes turn with disgust from the wild and rugged fea- 
tures of nature, and all her rough accompaniments — 
from man almost as wild ; and his heart sickens as 
he thinks of his own land, and all its scenes of beau- 
ty. He thinks not of the poor, who leave that land 
for want of bread, and find in this a kindly welcome, 
and the means of independence and advancement 
which their own denies them. 

He goes on, if he be a splenetic Sinbad, dischar- 
ging his sour bile on everybody that he comes in con- 
tact with, thus producing an amiable ripple in the 
current as he proceeds, that adds marvellously, no 
doubt, to his own quiet and personal comfort. If he 
have a true merry vein and hearty good nature, he 
gets on, laughing sometimes in his sleeve at others, 
and cracking his jokes on the unlucky pate of Broth- 
er Jonathan, who, if he is not very silly — which he 
very often is — laughs too, and joins in the jest, 
though it may be somewhat at his own expense. It 
matters little whether the tourist be Whig or Tory 
in his own land ; if the latter, he returns, probably, 
ten times the Conservative that he was when he left 
it. If Whig, or even Radical, it matters not ; his 
loyalty waxes warmer and warmer with every step 
of his progress among the Repubhcans ; and he finds 
that practical democracy, shouldering and elbowing 
its neighbours as it "goes ahead," is no more like 
the democracy which he has been accustomed to ad- 
mire in theory, than the real machinery, with its 



352 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

smell, smoke, and clatter, under full operation, is like 
the pretty toy which he sees as a model in the Pat- 
ent Office at Washington. 

There seems to be no people better constituted 
for travellers, at least for recording their travelling 
experiences, than the French. There is a mixture of 
frivolity and philosophy in their composition which 
is admirably suited to the exigencies of their situa- 
tion. They mingle readily with all classes and 
races, discarding for the time their own nationality 
— at least their national antipathies. Their pleas- 
ant vanity fills them with the desire of pleasing oth- 
ers, which most kindly reacts by their being them- 
selves pleased : 

" Pleased with himself, whom all the world can please." 

The Frenchman can even so far accommodate 
himself to habits alien to his own, that he can toler- 
ate those of the savages themselves, and enter into a 
sort of fellowship with them, without either party 
altogether discarding his national tastes and propen- 
sities. It is Chateaubriand, if we are not mistaken, 
who relates that, wandering in the solitudes of the 
American wilderness, his ears w^ere most unexpect- 
edly saluted by the sounds of a viohn. He had lit- 
tle doubt that one of his own countrymen must be 
at hand ; and in a wretched enclosure he found one 
of them, sure enough, teaching Messieurs les sauvages 
to dance. It is certain that this spirit of accommo- 
dation to the wild habits of their copper-coloured 
friends gave the French traders and missionaries 



MADAME CALDEROn's LIFE IN MEXICO. 353 

formerly an ascendency over the Aborigines which 
was never obtained by any otiier of the white men. 

The most comprehensive and truly philosophic 
work on the genius and institutions of this country, 
the best exposition of its social phenomena, its pres- 
ent condition, and probable future, are to be found 
in the pages of a Frenchman. It is in the French 
language, too, that by far the greatest work has been 
produced on the great Southern portion of our con- 
tinent, once comprehended under New Spain. 

To write a book of travels seems to most people 
to require as little preUminary preparation as to write 
a letter. One has only to jump into a coach, em- 
bark on board a steamboat, minute down his flying 
experiences and hair-breadth escapes, the aspect of 
the country as seen from the interior of a crowded 
diligence or a vanishing rail-car, note the charges of 
the landlords and the quality of the fare, a dinner or 
two at the minister's, the last new play or opera at 
the theatre, and the affair is done. It is very easy 
to do this, certainly ; very easy to make a bad book 
of travels, but by no means easy to make a good 
one. This requires as many and various qualifica- 
tions as to make any other good book ; qualifications 
which must vary with the character of the country 
one is to visit. Thus, for instance, it requires a very 
different preparation and stock of accomplishments 
to make the tour of Italy, its studios and its galleries 
of art, or of Egypt, with its immortal pyramids and 
mighty relics of a primeval age, the great cemetery of 
antiquity, from what it does to travel understand- 

Yy 



354 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ingly in our own land, a new creation, as it were, 
without monuments, without arts, w^here the only 
study of the traveller — the noblest of all studies, it is 
true — is man. The inattention to this difference of 
preparation, demanded by different places, has led 
many a clever writer to make a very worthless book, 
which would have been remedied had he consulted 
his own qualifications instead of taking the casual 
direction of the first steamboat or mail-coach that 
lay in his way. 

There is no country more difficult to discuss in 
all its multiform aspects than Mexico, or, rather, the 
wide region once comprehended under the name of 
New Spain. Its various climates, bringing to per- 
fection the vegetable products of the most distant 
latitudes ; its astonishing fruitfulness in its lower re- 
gionSy and its curse of barrenness over many a broad 
acre of its plateau ; its inexhaustible mines, that 
have flooded the Old World with an ocean of silver, 
such as Columbus in his wildest visions never 
dreamed of — and, unhappily, by a hard mischance, 
never lived to realize himself; its picturesque land- 
scape, where the volcanic fire gleams amid wastes 
of eternal snow, and a few" hours carry the traveller 
from the hot regions of the lemon and the cocoa to 
the wintry solitudes of the mountain fir ; its motley 
population, made up of Indians, old Spaniards, mod- 
ern Mexicans, meztizoes, mulattoes, and zambos; 
its cities built in the clouds ; its lakes of salt water, 
hundreds of miles from the ocean ; its people, with 
their wild and variegated costume, in keeping, as we 



MADAME CALDEROn's LIFE IN MEXICO. 355 

may say, with its extraordinary scenery ; its stately 
palaces, half furnished, where services of gold and 
silver plate load the tables in rooms without a car- 
pet, while the red dust of the bricks soils the dia- 
mond-sprinkled robes of the dancer; the costly attire 
of its higher classes, blazing with pearls and jewels ; 
the tawdry magnificence of its equipages, saddles 
inlaid with gold, bits and stirrups of massy silver, all 
executed in the clumsiest style of workmanship ; its 
lower classes — the men with their jackets glittering 
with silver buttons, and rolls of silver tinsel round 
their caps ; the women with petticoats fringed with 
lace, and white satin shoes on feet unprotected by a 
stocking; its high-born fair ones crowding to the 
cock-pit, and solacing themselves with the fumes of 
a cigar; its churches and convents, in which all 
those sombre rules of monastic life are maintained 
in their primitive rigour, which have died away be- 
fore the liberal spirit af the age on the other side of 
the water; its swarms oiUperoSy the lazzaroni of 
the land ; its hordes of almost legalized banditti, 
who stalk openly in the streets, and render the pres- 
ence of an armed escort necessary to secure a safe 
drive into the environs of the capital; its whole 
structure of society, in which a Republican form is 
thrown over institutions as aristocratic, and castes 
as nicely defined, as in any monarchy of Europe ; 
in short, its marvellous inconsistencies and contrasts 
in climate, character of the people, and face of the 
land — so marvellous as, we trust, to excuse the un- 
precedented length of this sentence — undoubtedly 



356 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

make modern Mexico one of the most prolific, origi- 
nal, and difficult themes for the study of the traveller. 
Yet this great theme has found in Humboldt a 
writer of strength sufficient to grapple with it in 
nearly all its relations. While yet a young man, or, 
at least, while his physical as well as mental ener- 
gies were in their meridian, he came over to this 
country with an enthusiasm for science which was 
only heightened by obstacles, and with stores of it 
already accumulated that enabled him to detect the 
nature of every new object that came under his eye, 
and arrange it in its proper class. With his scien- 
tific instruments in his hand, he might be seen sca- 
ling the snow-covered peaks of the Cordilleras, or 
diving into their unfathomable caverns of silver; now 
wandering through their dark forests in search of 
new specimens for his herbarium, now coasting the 
stormy shores of the Gulf, and penetrating its un- 
healthy streams, jotting down every landmark that 
might serve to guide the future navigator, or survey- 
ing the crested Isthmus in search of a practicable 
communication between the great seas on its bor- 
ders, and then, again, patiently studying the monu- 
ments and manuscripts of the Aztecs in the capital, 
or mingliug with the wealth and fashion in its sa- 
loons ; frequenting every place, in short, and every- 
where at home : 

" Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, .... omnia novit." 

The whole range of these various topics is brought 
under review in his pages, and on all he sheds a ray, 
sometimes a flood of light. His rational philosophy, 



MADAME CALDEROn's LIFE IN MEXICO. 357 

content rather to doubt than to decide, points out 
the track which other adventurous spirits may follow 
up with advantage. No antiquary has done so much 
towards determining the original hives of the semi- 
civilized races of the Mexican plateau. No one, not 
even of the Spaniards, has brought together such an 
important mass of information in respect to the re- 
sources, natural products, and statistics generally, of 
New Spain. His explorations have identified more 
than one locaUty, and illustrated more than one cu- 
rious monument of the people of Anahuac, which 
had baffled the inquiries of native antiquaries ; and 
his work, while imbodying the results of profound 
scholarship and art, is, at the same time, in many 
respects, the very best manuel du voyageur, and, as 
such, has been most freely used by subsequent tour- 
ists. It is true, his pages are sometimes disfigured 
by pedantry, ambitious display, learned obscurity, 
and other affectations of the man of letters. But 
what human work is without its blemishes \ His 
various writings on the subject of New Spain, taken 
collectively, are one of those monuments which may 
be selected to show the progress of the species. 
Their author reminds us of one of the ancient ath- 
letae, who descended into the arena to hurl the dis- 
cus with a giant arm, that distanced every cast of 
his contemporaries ! 

There is one branch of his fruitful subject which 
M. de Humboldt has not exhausted, and, indeed, has 
but briefly touched on. This is the social condition 
of the country, especially as found in its picturesque 



358 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

capital. This has been discussed by subsequent 
travellers more folly, and Ward, Bullock, Lyons, 
Poinsett, Tudor, Latrobe, have all produced works 
which have for their object, more or less, the social 
habits and manners of the people. With most of 
them this is not the prominent object ; and others 
of them, probably, have found obstacles in effecting 
it, to any great extent, from an imperfect knowledge 
of the language — the golden key to the sympathies 
of a people — without which a traveller is as much 
at fault as a man without an eye for colour in a pic- 
ture-gallery, or an ear for music at a concert. He 
may see and hear, indeed, in both, but cui bono 1 
The traveller, ignorant of the language of the nation 
whom he visits, may descant on the scenery, the 
roads, the architecture, the outside of things, the 
rates and distances of posting, the dress of the peo- 
ple in the streets, and may possibly meet a native 
or two, half denaturalized, kept to dine with stran- 
gers at his banker's. But as to the interior mech- 
anism of society, its secret sympathies, and familiar 
tone of thinking and feeling, he can know no more 
than he could of the contents of a library by run- 
ning over the titles of strange and unknown authors 
packed together on the shelves. 

It was to supply this deficiency that the work be- 
fore us, no doubt, was given to the public, and it was 
composed under circumstances that afforded every 
possible advantage and facility to its author. Al- 
though the initials only of the name are given in the 
title-page, yet, from these and certain less equivocal 



MADAME CALDERON's LIFE IN MEXICO. 359 

passages in the body of the work, it requires no 
CEdipus to divine that the author is the wife of the 
Chevaher Calderon de la Barca, well known in this 
country during his long residence as Spanish minis- 
ter at Washington, where his amiable manners and 
high personal qualities secured him general respect, 
and the regard of all who knew him. On the recog- 
nition of the independence of Mexico by the mother 
country, Senor Calderon was selected to fill the 
office of the first Spanish envoy to the Republic. It 
was a delicate mission after so long an estrangement, 
and it was hailed by the Mexicans with every dem- 
onstration of pride and satisfaction. Though twen- 
ty years had elapsed since they had estabUshed their 
independence, yet they felt as a wayward son may 
feel who, having absconded from the paternal roof 
and set up for himself, still looks back to it with a 
sort of reverence, and, in the plenitude of his pros- 
perity, still feels the want of the parental benediction. 
We, who cast off our allegiance in a similar way, 
can comprehend the feeling. The new minister, 
from the moment of his setting foot on the Mexican 
shore, was greeted with an enthusiasm which attest- 
ed the popular feeling, and his presence in the cap- 
ital was celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, bull- 
fights, illuminations, fetes pubhc and private, and 
every possible demonstration of respect for the new 
envoy and the country who sent him. His position 
secured him access to every place of interest to an 
intelligent stranger, and introduced him into the most 
intimate recesses of society, from which the stranger 



360 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

is commonly excluded, and to which, indeed, none 
but a Spaniard could, under any circumstances, have 
been admitted. Fortunately, the minister possessed, 
in the person of his accomplished wife, one who had 
both the leisure and the talent to profit by these un- 
common opportunities, and the result is given in 
the work before us, consisting of letters to her family, 
which, it seems, since her return to the United States, 
have been gathered together and prepared for pub- 
lication.* 

******* 

The present volumes make no pretensions to en- 
large the boundaries of our knowledge in respect to 
the mineral products of the country, its geography, 
its statistics, or, in short, to physical or political sci- 
ence. These topics have been treated with more 
or less depth by the various travellers who have writ- 
ten since the great publications of Humboldt. We 
have had occasion to become tolerably well acquaint- 
ed with their productions ; and we may safely assert, 
that for spirited portraiture of society — a society un- 
like anything existing in the Old World or the New 
— for picturesque delineation of scenery, for richness 
of illustration and anecdote, and for the fascinating 
graces of style, no one of them is to be compared 
with " Life in Mexico." 

* The analysis of the work, with several pages of extracts from it, is 
here omitted, as containing nothing that is not already familiar to the 
English reader. 



I 



MOLIERE. 361 



MOLIERE. 

OCTOBER, 1828. 

The French surpass every other nation, indeed 
all the other nations of Europe put together, in the 
amount and excellence of their memoirs. Whence 
comes this manifest superiority? The important 
Collection relating to the History of France, com- 
mencing as early as the thirteenth century, forms a 
basis of civil history, more authentic, circumstantial, 
and satisfactory to an intelligent inquirer than is to 
be found among any other people ; and the multi- 
tude of biographies, personal anecdotes, and similar 
scattered notices, which have appeared in France 
during the tvi^o last centuries, throw a flood of light 
on the social habits and general civiUzation of the 
period in which they were written. The Italian 
histories (and every considerable city in Italy, says 
Tiraboschi, had its historian as early as the thirteenth 
century) are fruitful only in wars, massacres, trea- 
sonable conspiracies, or diplomatic intrigues, matters 
that affect the tranquillity of the state. The rich 
body of Spanish chronicles, which maintain an un- 
broken succession from the reign of Alphonso the 
Wise to that of PhiHp the Second, are scarcely 
more personal or interesting in their details, unless it 
be in reference to the sovereign and his immediate 

* " Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de Moliere. Par J. Taschereau." 
Paris. 1825. 

Z z 



362 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

court. Even the English, in their memoirs and au- 
tobiographies of the last century, are too exckisively 
confined to topics of pubUc notoriety, as the only 
subject worthy of record, or which can excite a gen- 
eral interest in their readers. Not so with the French. 
The most frivolous details assume in their eyes an 
importance, when they can be made illustrative of 
an eminent character; and even when they con- 
cern one of less note, they become sufficiently inter- 
esting, as just pictures of life and manners. Hence, 
instead of exhibiting their hero only as he appears 
on the great theatre, they carry us along with him 
into retirement, or into those social circles where, 
stripped of his masquerade dress, he can indulge in 
all the natural gayety of his heart — in those frivoli- 
ties and foUies which display the real character 
much better than all his premeditated wisdom ; those 
little nothings, which make up so much of the sum 
of French memoirs, but which, however amusing, 
are apt to be discarded by their more serious Eng- 
lish neighbours as something derogatory to their 
hero. Where shall we find a more lively portrait- 
ure of that interesting period, when feudal barbarism 
began to fade away before the civihzed institutions 
of modern times, than in Philip de Comines' sketch- 
es of the courts of France and Burgundy in the lat- 
ter half of the fifteenth century ? Where a more 
nice development of the fashionable intrigues, the 
corrupt MachiaveHan politics which animated the 
little coteries, male and female, of Paris, under the 
regency of Anne of Austria, than in the Memoirs of 



MOLIERE. 363 

De Retz 1 To say nothing of the vast amount of 
similar contributions in France during the last cen- 
tury, which, in the shape of letters and anecdotes, 
as well as memoirs, have made us as intimately ac- 
quainted with the internal movements of society in 
Paris, under all its aspects, literary, fashionable, and 
political, as if they had passed in review before our 
own eyes. 

The French have been remarked for their excel- 
lence in narrative ever since the times of the fabli- 
aux and the old Norman romances. Somewhat of 
their success in this way may be imputed to the 
structure of their language, whose general currency, 
and whose peculiar fitness for prose composition, 
have been noticed from a very early period. Bru- 
netto Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his Tesoro 
in French, in preference to his own tongue, as far 
back as the middle of the thirteenth century, on the 
ground " that its speech was the most universal and 
most delectable of all the dialects of Europe." And 
Dante asserts in his treatise *' on Vulgar Eloquence," 
that "the superiority of the French consists in its 
adaptation, by means of its facility and agreeable- 
ness, to narratives in prose." Much of the wild, art- 
less grace, the naivete, which characterized it in its 
infancy, has been gradually polished away by fas- 
tidious critics, and can scarcely be said to have sur- 
vived Marot and Montaigne. But the language has 
gained considerably in perspicuity, precision, and 
simplicity of construction, to which the jealous la- 
bours of the French Academy must be admitted to 



364 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

have contributed essentially. This simplicity of 
construction, refusing those complicated inversions 
so usual in the other languages of the Continent, and 
its total w^ant of prosody, though fatal to poetical 
purposes, have greatly facilitated its acquisition to 
foreigners, and have made it a most suitable vehicle 
for conversation. Since the time of Louis the Four- 
teenth, accordingly, it has become the language of 
the courts, and the popular medium of communica- 
tion in most of the countries of Europe. Since 
that period, too, it has acquired a number of elegant 
phrases and familiar turns of expression, which have 
admirably fitted it for light, popular narrative, like 
that v^hich enters into memoirs, letter-vi^riting, and 
similar kinds of composition. 

The character and situation of the w^riters them- 
selves may account still better for the success of the 
French in this department. Many of them, as Join- 
ville. Sully, Comines, De Thou, Rochefoucault, Tor- 
cy, have been men of rank and education, the coun- 
sellors or the friends of princes, acquiring from ex- 
perience a shrewd perception of the character and 
of the forms of society. Most of them have been 
familiarized in those polite circles which, in Paris 
more than any other capital, seem to combine the 
love of dissipation and fashion with a high relish for 
intellectual pursuits. The state of society in France, 
or, what is the same thing, in Paris, is admirably 
suited to the purposes of the memoir-writer. The 
cheerful, gregarious temper of the inhabitants, which 
mingles all ranks in the common pursuit of pleasure ; 



MOLIERE. 365 

the external polish, which scarcely deserts them in 
the commission of the grossest violence ; the influ- 
ence of the women, during the last two centuries, 
far superior to that of the sex among any other peo- 
ple, and exercised alike on matters of taste, politics, 
and letters ; the gallantry and hcentious intrigues so 
usual in the higher classes of this gay metropolis, 
and which fill even the life of a man of letters, so 
stagnant in every other country, with stirring and 
romantic adventure ; all these, we say, make up a 
rich and varied panorama, that can hardly fail of 
interest under the hand of the most common artist. 

Lastly, the vanity of the French may be consid- 
ered as another cause of their success in this kind 
of writing ; a vanity which leads them to disclose a 
thousand amusing particulars, which the reserve of 
an Englishman, and perhaps his pride, would discard 
as altogether unsuitable to the public ear. This van- 
ity, it must be confessed, however, has occasionally 
seduced their writers, under the garb of confessions 
and secret memoirs, to make such a disgusting ex- 
posure of human infirmity as few men would be 
willing to admit, even to themselves. 

The best memoirs of late produced in France 
seem to have assumed somewhat of a novel shape. 
While they are written with the usual freedom and 
vivacity, they are fortified by a body of references 
and illustrations that attest an unwonted degree of 
elaboration and research. Such are those of Rous- 
seau, La Fontaine, and MoHere, lately published. 
The last of these, which forms the subject of our ar- 



366 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tide, is a compilation of all that has ever been re- 
corded of the life of Moliere. It is executed in an 
agreeable manner, and has the merit of examining, 
with more accuracy than has been hitherto done, 
certain doubtful points in his biography, and of assem- 
bling together in a convenient form what has before 
been diffused over a great variety of surface. But, 
however famihar most of these particulars may be 
to the countrymen of Moliere (by far the greatest 
comic genius in his own nation, and, in very many 
respects, inferior to none in any other), they are not 
so current elsewhere as to lead us to imagine that 
some account of his life and literary labours would 
be altogether unacceptable to our readers. 

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere) was born in Par- 
is, January 15, 1622. His father was an upholster- 
er, as his grandfather had been before him ; and the 
young Poquelin was destined to exercise the same 
hereditary craft, to which, indeed, he served an ap- 
prenticeship until the age of fourteen. In this deter- 
mination his father was confirmed by the office which 
he had obtained for himself, in connexion with his 
original vocation, oi valet dechamhre to the king, with 
the promise of a reversion of it to his son on his own 
decease. The youth accordingly received only such 
a meager elementary education as was usual with 
the artisans of that day. But a secret consciousness 
of his own powers convinced him that he was des- 
tined by nature for higher purposes than that of quilt- 
ing sofas and hanging tapestry. His occasional pres- 
ence at the theatrical representations of i\\e Hotel de 



MOLIERE. 367 

Bourgogne is said also to have awakened in his mind, 
at this period, a passion for the drama. He therefore 
solicited his father to assist him in obtaining more 
liberal instruction; and when the latter at length 
yielded to the repeated entreaties of his son, it was 
with the reluctance of one who imagines that he is 
spoiling a good mechanic in order to make a poor 
scholar. He was accordingly introduced into the 
Jesuits' College of Clermont, where he followed the 
usual course of study for five years with diligence 
and credit. He was fortunate enough to pursue the 
study of philosophy under the direction of the cele- 
brated Gassendi, with his fellow-pupils, Chapelle the 
poet, afterward his intimate friend, and Bernier, so 
famous subsequently for his travels in the East, but 
who, on his return, had the misfortune to lose the 
favour of Louis the Fourteenth by replying to him, 
that * of all the countries he had ever seen, he pre- 
ferred Switzerland.' 

On the completion of his studies in 1641, he was 
required to accompany the king, then Louis the 
Thirteenth, in his capacity of valet de chamhre (his 
father being detained in Paris by his infirmities), on 
an excursion to the south of France. This journey 
afforded him the opportunity of becoming intimately 
acquainted with the habits of the court, as well as 
those of the provinces, of which he afterward so re- 
peatedly availed himself in his comedies. On his 
return he commenced the study of the law, and had 
completed it, it would appear, when his old passion 
for the theatre revived with increased ardour, and, 



368 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

after some hesitation, he determined no longer to 
withstand the decided impulse of his genius. He 
associated himself with one of those city companies 
of players with which Paris had swarmed since the 
days of Richelieu — a minister who aspired after the 
same empire in the republic of letters which he had 
so long maintained over the state, and whose osten- 
tatious patronage eminently contributed to develop 
that taste for dramatic exhibition which has distin- 
guished his countrymen ever since. 

The consternation of the elder Poquelin, on re- 
ceiving the intelligence of his son's unexpected de- 
termination, may be readily conceived. It blasted at 
once all the fair promise which the rapid progress 
the latter had made in his studies justified him in 
forming, and it degraded him to an unfortunate pro- 
fession, esteemed at that time even more lightly in 
France than it has been in other countries. The 
humihating dependance of the comedian on the pop- 
ular favour, the daily exposure of his person to the 
caprice and insults of an unfeeling audience, the nu- 
merous temptations incident to his precarious and 
unsettled life, may furnish abundant objections to this 
profession in the mind of every parent. But in 
France, to all these objections were superadded oth- 
ers of a graver cast, founded on religion. The cler- 
gy there, alarmed at the rapidly-increasing taste for 
dramatic exhibitions, openly denounced these elegant 
recreations as an insult to the Deity ; and the pious 
father anticipated, in this preference of his son, his 
spiritual no less than his temporal perdition. He 



MOLIERE. 369 

actually made an earnest remonstrance to him to this 
effect, through the intervention of one of his friends, 
who, however, instead of converting the youth, was 
himself persuaded to join the company then organ- 
izing under his direction. But his family were nev- 
er reconciled to his proceeding ; and even at a later 
period of his Hfe, when his splendid successes in his 
new career had shown how rightly he had under- 
stood the character of his own genius, they never 
condescended to avail themselves of the freedom of 
admission to his theatre, which he repeatedly prof- 
fered. M. Bret, his editor, also informs us, that he 
had himself seen a genealogical tree in the posses- 
sion of the descendants of this same family, in which 
the name of Moliere was not even admitted ! Un- 
less it were to trace their connexion with so illus- 
trious a name, what could such a family want of a 
genealogical tree ! It was from a deference to these 
scruples that our hero annexed to his patronymic 
the name of Moliere, hy which alone he has been 
recognised by posterity. 

During the three following years he continued 
playing in Paris, until the turbulent regency of Anne 
of Austria withdrew the attention of the people from 
the quiet pleasures of the drama to those of civil 
broil and tumult. Moliere then quitted the capital 
for the south of France. From this period, 1646 to 
1658, his history presents few particulars worthy of 
record. He wandered with his company through 
the different provinces, writing a few farces which 
have long since perished, performing at the princi- 

A A A 



370 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

pal cities, and, wherever he went, by his superior 
talent withdrawing the crowd from every other spec- 
tacle to the exhibition of his own. During this pe- 
riod, too, he was busily storing his mind with those 
nice observations of men and manners so essential 
to the success of the dramatist, and which were to 
ripen there until a proper time for their development 
should arrive. At the town of Pezenas they still 
show an elbow-chair of Mohere's (as at Montpelier 
they show the gown of Rabelais), in which the poet, 
it is said, ensconced in a corner of a barber's shop, 
would sit for the hour together, silently watching the 
air, gestures, and grimaces of the village politicians, 
who, in those days, before coffee-houses were intro- 
duced into France, used to congregate in this place 
of resort. The fruits of this study may be easily 
discerned in those original draughts of character 
from the middling and lower classes with which his 
pieces everywhere abound. 

In the south of France he met with the Prince of 
Conti, with whom he had contracted a friendship at 
the college of Clermont, and who received him with 
great hospitality. The prince pressed upon him the 
office of his private secretary ; but, fortunately for let- 
ters, Moliere was constant in his devotion to the 
drama, assigning as his reason that "the occupation 
was of too serious a complexion to suit his taste ; 
and that, though he might make a passable author, 
he should make a very poor secretary." Perhaps 
he was influenced in this refusal, also, by the fate of 
the preceding incumbent, who had lately died of a 



MOLIERE. 371 

fever, in consequence of a blow from the fire-tongs, 
which his highness, in a fit of ill humour, had given 
him on the temple. However this may be, it was 
owing to the good offices of the prmce that he ob- 
tained access to Monsieur, the only brother of Louis 
the Fourteenth, and father of the celebrated regent, 
Philip of Orleans, who, on his return to Paris in 
1658, introduced him to the king, before whom, in 
the month of October following, he was allowed, 
with his company, to perform a tragedy of Corneille's 
and one of his own farces. 

His little corps was now permitted to establish 
itself under the title of the " Company of Monsieur," 
and the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon was assigned 
as the place for its performances. Here, in the 
course of a few weeks, he brought out his Etourdi 
and Le Depit Amoureux, comedies in verse and in 
fi\e acts, which he had composed during his provin- 
cial pilgrimage, and which, although deficient in an 
artful liaison of scenes and in probability of inci- 
dent, exhibit, particularly the last, those fine touches 
of the ridiculous, which revealed the future author 
of the Tartuffe and the Misanthrope. They indeed 
found greater favour with the audience than some 
of his later pieces ; for in the former they could only 
compare him with the wretched models that had 
preceded him, while in the latter they were to com- 
pare him with himself 

In the ensuing year Moliere exhibited his celebra- 
ted farce of Les Precieuses Ridicules ; a piece in only 
one act, but which, by its inimitable satire, effected 



372 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

such a revolution in the hterary taste of his country- 
men as has been accomphshed by few works of a 
more imposing form, and which may be considered 
as the basis of the dramatic glory of Moliere, and the 
dawn of good comedy in France. This epoch was 
the commencement of that brilliant period in French 
literature which is so well known as the age of 
Louis the Fourteenth ; and yet it was distinguish- 
ed by such a puerile, meretricious taste, as is rarely 
to be met with except in the incipient stages of civ- 
ilization, or in its last decline. The cause of this 
melancholy perversion of intellect is mainly imputa- 
ble to the influence of a certain coterie of wits, whose 
rank, talents, and successful authorship had author- 
ized them, in some measure, to set up as the arbi- 
ters of taste and fashion. This choice assembly, 
consisting of the splenetic Rochefoucault ; the hel- 
esprit Voiture ; Balzac, whose letters afford the ear- 
liest example of numbers in French prose ; the lively 
and licentious Bussy; Rabutin; Chapelain, who, as 
a wit has observed, might still have had a reputation 
had it not been for his " Pucelle ;" the poet Bense- 
rade ; Menage, and others of less note ; together 
with such eminent women as Madame Lafayette, 
Mademoiselle Scuderi (whose eternal romances, the 
delight of her own age, have been the despair of 
every other), and even the elegant Sevigne, was ac- 
customed to hold its reunions principally at the Ho- 
tel de Ramhouillet, the residence of the marchioness 
of that name, and which, from this circumstance, has 
acquired such ill-omened notoriety in the history of 
letters. 



MOLIERE. 373 

Here they were wont to hold the most solemn 
discussions on the most frivolous topics, but especi- 
ally on matters relating to gallantry and love, which 
they debated with all the subtilty and metaphysical 
refinement that centuries before had characterized 
the romantic Courts of Love in the south of France. 
All this was conducted in an affected jargon, in which 
the most common things, instead of being called by 
their usual names, were signified by ridiculous peri- 
phrases ; which, while it required neither wit nor 
ingenuity to invent them, could have had no other 
merit, even in their own eyes, than that of being un- 
intelligible to the vulgar. To this was superadded 
a tone of exaggerated sentiment, and a ridiculous 
code of etiquette, by which the intercourse of these 
exclusives was to be regulated with each other, all 
borrowed from the absurd romances of Calprenede 
and Scuderi. Even the names of the parties under- 
went a metamorphosis, and Madame de Rambouil- 
let's christian name of Catherine being found too 
trite and unpoetical, was converted into Arthenice, 
by which she was so generally recognised as to be 
designated by it in Flechier's eloquent funeral ora- 
tion on her daughter.* These insipid affectations, 
which French critics are fond of imputing to an 
ItaHan influence, savour quite as much of the Span- 
ish cultismo as of the concetti of the former nation, 
and may be yet more fairly referred to the same 

* How comes La Harpe to fall into the error of supposing that Flechier 
referred to Madame Montausier by this epithet of Arthenice 7 The bish- 
op's style in this passage is as unequivocal as usual. See Cours de Lit- 
terature, &c., tome vi., p. 167. 



374 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

false principles of taste which distinguished the 
French Pleiades of the sixteenth century, and the 
more ancient compositions of their Provenqal an- 
cestors. Dictionaries were compiled, and treatises 
written illustrative of this precious vocabulary ; all 
were desirous of being initiated into the mysteries of 
so elegant a science : even such men as Corneille and 
Bossuet did not disdain to frequent the saloons where 
it was studied ; the spirit of imitation, more active 
in France than in other countries, took possession 
of the provinces ; every village had its coterie of 
precieuses after the fashion of the capital, and a false 
taste and criticism threatened to infect the very sour- 
ces of pure and healthful literature. 

It was against this fashionable corruption that 
Moliere aimed his wit in the little satire of the 
"Precieuses Ridicules," in which the valets of two 
noblemen are represented as aping their masters' 
tone of conversation for the purpose of imposing on 
two young ladies fresh from the provinces, and great 
admirers of the new style. The absurdity of these 
affectations is still more strongly relieved by the con- 
temptuous incredulity of the father and servant, who 
do not comprehend a word of them. By this pro- 
cess Moliere succeeded both in exposing and de- 
grading these absurd pretensions, as he showed how 
opposite they were to common sense, and how ea- 
sily they were to be acquired by the most vulgar 
minds. The success was such as might have been 
anticipated on an appeal to popular feeling, where 
nature must always triumph over the arts of affecta- 



MOLIERE. 375 

tion. The piece was welcomed with enthusiastic 
applause, and the disciples of the Hotel Ramhouillet^ 
most of whom were present at the first exhibition, 
beheld the fine fabric which they had been so pain- 
fully constructing brought to the ground by a single 
blow. "And these follies," said Menage to Chape- 
lain, " which you and I see so finely criticised here, 
are what we have b^en so long admiring. We 
must go home and burn our idols." " Courage, Mo- 
liere," cried an old man from the pit ; " this is gen- 
uine comedy." The price of the seats was doubled 
from the time of the second representation. Nor 
were the effects of the satire merely transitory. It 
converted an epithet of praise into one of reproach ; 
and a femme precieuse, a style precieux, a ton pre- 
cieux, once so much admired, have ever since been 
used only to signify the most ridiculous affectation. 

There was, in truth, however, quite as much luck 
as merit in this success of Moliere, whose produc- 
tion exhibits no finer raillery or better sustained di- 
alogue than are to be found in many of his subse- 
quent pieces. It assured him, however, of his own 
strength, and disclosed to him the mode in which 
he should best hit the popular taste. " I have no 
occasion to study Plautus or Terence any longer," 
said he ; "I must henceforth study the world." The 
world, accordingly, was his study ; and the exquisite 
models of character which it furnished him will last 
as long as it shall endure. 

In 1660 he brought out the excellent comedy of 
the Ecole des Maris, and in the course of the same 



376 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

month, that of the Facheux, in three acts — compo- 
sed, learned, and performed within the brief space 
of a fortnight ; an expedition evincing the dexterity 
of the manager no less than that of the author. 
This piece was written at the request of Fouquet, 
superintendent of finances to Louis the Fourteenth, 
for the magnificent fete at Vaux, given by him to 
that monarch, and lavishly celebrated in the me- 
moirs of the period, and with yet more elegance in 
a poetical epistle of La Fontaine to his friend De 
Maucroix. This minister had been intrusted with 
the principal care of the finances under Cardinal 
Mazarine, and had been continued in the same 
office by Louis the Fourteenth, on his own assump- 
tion of the government. The monarch, however, 
alarmed at the growing dilapidations of the revenue, 
requested from the superintendent an expose of its 
actual condition, which, on receiving, he privately 
communicated to Colbert, the rival and successor of 
Fouquet. The latter, whose ordinary expenditure 
far exceeded that of any other subject in the king- 
dom, and who, in addition to immense sums occa- 
sionally lost at play and daily squandered on his 
debaucheries, is said to have distributed in pensions 
more than four millions of livres annually, thought 
it would be an easy matter to impose on a young 
and inexperienced prince, who had hitherto shown 
himself more devoted to pleasure than business, and 
accordingly gave in false returns, exaggerating the 
expenses, and diminishing the actual receipts of the 
treasury. The detection of this peculation deter- 



MOLIERE. 377 

mined Louis to take the first occasion of dismissing 
his powerful minister ; but his ruin was precipitated 
and completed by the discovery of an indiscreet 
passion for Madame de la Valliere, whose fascinating 
graces were then beginning to acquire for her that 
ascendency over the youthful monarch which has 
since condemned her name to such unfortunate ce- 
lebrity. The portrait of this lady, seen in the apart- 
ments of the favourite on the occasion to which we 
have adverted, so incensed Louis, that he would 
have had him arrested on the spot but for the sea- 
sonable intervention of the queen-mother, who re- 
minded him that Fouquet was his host. It was for 
t\nsfete at Vaux, whose palace and ample domains, 
covering the extent of three villages, had cost their 
proprietor the sum, almost incredible for that period, 
of eighteen million livres, that Fouquet put in re- 
quisition all the various talents of the capital, the 
dexterity of its artists, and the invention of its finest 
poets. He was particularly lavish in his prepara- 
tions for the dramatic portion of the entertainment. 
Le Brun passed for a while from his victories of 
Alexander to paint the theatrical decorations ; To- 
reUi was employed to contrive the machinery ; Pe- 
lisson furnished the prologue, much admired in its 
day, and Moliere his comedy of the Fdcheux. 

This piece, the hint for which may have been 
suggested by Horace's ninth satire, Iham forte via 
Sacra, is an amusing caricature of the various bores 
that infest society, rendered the more vexatious by 
their intervention at the very moment when a young 

Bbb 



378 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

lover is hastening to the place of assignation with 
his mistress. Louis the Fourteenth, after the per- 
formance, seeing his master of the hunts near him, 
M. Soyecour, a personage remarkably absent, and 
inordinately devoted to the pleasures of the chase, 
pointed him out to Moliere as an original whom he 
had omitted to bring upon his canvass. The poet 
took the hint, and the following day produced an 
excellent scene, where this Nimrod is made to go 
through the technics of his art, in which he had him- 
self, with great complaisance, instructed the mis- 
chievous satirist, who had drawn him into a conver- 
sation for that very purpose on the preceding evening. 
This play was the origin of the comedie-hallet, af- 
terward so popular in France. The residence at 
Vaux brought Moliere more intimately in contact 
with the king and the court than he had before been ; 
and from this time may be dated the particular en- 
couragement which he ever after received from this 
prince, and which eventually enabled him to triumph 
over the malice of his enemies. A few days after this 
magnificent entertainment, Fouquet was thrown into 
prison, where he was suffered to languish the remain- 
der of his days, " which," says the historian from 
whom we have gathered these details, " he termina- 
ted in sentiments of the most sincere piety ;"* a ter- 
mination by no means uncommon in France with 
that class of persons, of either sex, respectively, who 
have had the misfortune to survive their fortune or 
their beauty. 

* Histoire de la Vie, &c., de La Fontaine, par M. Valckenaer. Paris, 
1824. 



MOLIERE. 379 

In February, 1662, Moliere formed a matrimonial 
connexion with Mademoiselle Bejart, a young co- 
median of his company, who had been educated un- 
der his own eye, and whose wit and captivating gra- 
ces had effectually ensnared the poet's heart, but for 
which he was destined to perform doleful penance 
the remainder of his life. The disparity of their 
ages, for the lady was hardly seventeen, might have 
afforded in itself a sufficient objection ; and he had 
no reason to flatter himself that she would remain 
uninfected by the pernicious example of the society 
in which she had been educated, and of which he 
himself was not altogether an immaculate member. 
In his excellent comedy of the Ecole des Femmes, 
brought forward the same year, the story turns upon 
the absurdity of an old man's educating a young 
woman for the purpose, at some future time, of mar- 
rying her, which wise plan is defeated by the un- 
seasonable apparition of a young lover, who in five 
minutes undoes what it had cost the veteran so 
many years to contrive. The pertinency of this 
moral to the poet's own situation shows how much 
easier it is to talk wisely than to act so. 

This comedy, popular as it was on its represent- 
ation, brought upon the head of its author a tempest 
of parody, satire, and even slander, from those of his 
own craft who were jealous of his unprecedented 
success, and from those literary petits-inaitres who 
still smarted with the stripes inflicted on them in 
some of his previous performances. One of this lat- 
ter class, incensed at the applauses bestowed upon 



380 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the piece on the night of its first representation, in- 
dignantly exclaimed, Ris done, 'parterre ! ris done ! 
" Laugh then, pit, if you will !" and immediately 
quitted the theatre. 

Moliere was not slow in avenging himself of these 
interested criticisms, by means of a little piece enti- 
tled La Critique de r Ecole des FemmeSy in which he 
brings forward the various objections made to his 
comedy, and ridicules them with unsparing severity. 
These objections appear to have been chiefly of a 
verbal nature. A few such famihar phrases as Tarte 
a la creme, Enfans par Voreille, &c., gave particular 
offence to the purists of that day, and, in the prudish 
spirit of French criticism, have since been condemn- 
ed by Voltaire and La Harpe as unworthy of comedy. 
One of the personages introduced into the Critique 
is a marquis, who, when repeatedly interrogated as 
to the nature of his objections to the comedy, has no 
other answer to make than by his eternal Tao'te a la 
creme. The Due de Feuillade, a coxcomb of little 
brains but great pretension, was the person gener- 
ally supposed to be here intended. The peer, une- 
qual to an encounter of wits with his antagonist, re- 
sorted to a coarser remedy. Meeting Moliere one 
day in the gallery at Versailles, he advanced as if to 
embrace him ; a civility which the great lords of 
that day occasionally condescended to bestow upon 
their inferiors. As the unsuspecting poet inclined 
himself to receive the salute, the duke, seizing his 
head between his hands, rubbed it briskly against 
the buttons of his coat, repeating, at the same time, 



MOLTERE. 381 

Tarte a la creme, Monsieur, tarte a la creme. The 
king, on receiving intelligence of this affront, was 
highly indignant, and reprimanded the duke with 
great asperity. He, at the same time, encouraged 
Moliere to defend himself with his own weapons ; 
a privilege of which he speedily availed himself, in 
a caustic little satire in one act, entitled Lnpromptu 
de Versailles, " The marquis," he says in this piece, 
" is nowadays the droll (le plaisant) of the comedy ; 
and as our ancestors always introduced a jester to 
furnish mirth for the audience, so we must have re- 
course to some ridiculous marquis to divert them." 

It is obvious that Moliere could never have main- 
tained this independent attitude if he had not been 
protected by the royal favour. Indeed, Louis was 
constant in giving him this protection ; and when, 
soon after this period, the character of Moliere was 
blackened by the vilest imputations, the monarch 
testified his conviction of his innocence by publicly 
standing godfather to his child — a tribute of respect 
equally honourable to the prince and the poet. The 
king, moreover, granted him a pension of a thousand 
livres annually ; and to his company, which hence- 
forth took the title of " comedians of the king," a 
pension of seven thousand. Our author received his 
pension, as one of a long list of men of letters, who 
experienced a similar bounty from the royal hand. 
The curious estimate exhibited in this document of 
the relative merits of these literary stipendiaries af- 
fords a striking evidence that the decrees of contem- 
poraries are not unfrequently to be reversed by pos- 



382 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

terity. The obsolete Chapelain is there recorded 
" as the greatest French poet who has ever existed ;" 
in consideration of which, his stipend amounted to 
three thousand livres, while Boileau's name, for which 
his satires had already secured an imperishable exist- 
ence, is not even noticed ! It should be added, how- 
ever, on the authority of Boileau, that Chapelain 
himself had the principal hand in furnishing this 
apocryphal scale of merit to the minister. 

In the month of September, 1665, Moliere pro- 
duced his L' Amour Medecin, a comedie-hallet, in three 
acts, which, from the time of its conception to that 
of its performance, consumed only ^\q days. This 
piece, although displaying no more than his usual 
talent for caustic raillery, is remarkable as affording 
the earliest demonstration of those direct hostilities 
upon the medical faculty, which he maintained at 
intervals during the rest of his hfe, and which he 
may be truly said to have died in maintaining. In 
this he followed the example of Montaigne, who, in 
particular, devotes one of the longest chapters in his 
work to a tirade against the profession, which he en- 
forces by all the ingenuity of his wit, and his usual 
wealth of illustration. In this, also, Moliere was 
subsequently imitated by Le Sage, as every reader 
of Gil Bias will readily call to mind. Both Mon- 
taigne and Le Sage, however, like most other libel- 
lers of the healing art, were glad to have recourse 
to it in the hour of need. Not so with Moliere. 
His satire seems to have been without affectation. 
Though an habitual valetudinarian, he relied almost 



MOLIERE. 383 

wholly on the temperance of his diet for the re-es- 
tablishment of his health. " What use do you make 
of your physician 1" said the king to him one day. 
" We chat together, sire," said the poet; "he gives 
me his prescriptions ; I never follow them, and so I 
get well." 

An ample apology for this infidelity may be found 
in the state of the profession at that day, whose 
members affected to disguise a profound ignorance 
of the true principles of science under a pompous 
exterior, which, however it might impose upon the 
vulgar, could only bring them into deserved discredit 
with the better portion of the community. The 
physicians of that time are described as parading the 
streets of Paris on mules, dressed in a long robe and 
bands, holding their conversation in bad Latin, or, it 
they condescended to employ the vernacular, mixing 
it up with such a jargon of scholastic phrase and sci- 
entific technics as to render it perfectly unintelligible 
to vulgar ears. The following lines, cited by M. 
Taschereau, and written in good earnest at the time, 
seem to hit off most of these pecuUarities. 

" AfFecter un air pedantesque, 
Cracher du Grec et du Latin, 
Longue perruque, habit grotesque, 
De la fourrure et du satin, 
Tout cela reuni fait presque 
Ce qu'on appelle un medecin."* 

* A gait and air somewhat pedantic, 
And scarce to spit but Greek or Latin, 

A long peruke and habit antic, 
Sometimes of fur, sometimes of satin, 

Form the receipt by which 'tis showed 

How to make doctors d la mode. 



384 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

In addition to these absurdities, the physicians of 
that period exposed themselves to still farther deris- 
ion by the contrariety of their opinions, and the 
animosity with which they maintained them. The 
famous consultation in the case of Cardinal Maza- 
rine was well known in its day ; one of his four medi- 
cal attendants affirming the seat of his disorder to be 
the liver, another the lungs, a third the spleen, and 
a fourth the mesentery. Moliere's raillery, therefore, 
against empirics, in a profession where mistakes are 
so easily made, so difficult to be detected, and the 
only one in which they are irremediable, stands 
abundantly excused from the censures which have 
been heaped upon it. Its effects were visible in the 
reform which, in his own time, it effected in their 
manners, if in nothing farther. They assumed the 
dress of men of the world, and gradually adopted the 
popular forms of communication ; an essential step 
to improvement, since nothing cloaks ignorance and 
empiricism more effectually with the vulgar than an 
affected use of learned phrase and a technical vo- 
cabulary. 

We are now arrived at that period of Moliere's 
career when he composed his Misanthrope, a play 
which some critics have esteemed his masterpiece, 
and which all concur in admiring as one of the no- 
blest productions of the modern drama. Its literary 
execution, too, of paramount importance in the eye 
of a French critic, is more nicely elaborated than in 
any other of the pieces of Moliere, if we except the 
Tartuffe, and its didactic dialogue displays a rnatu- 



MOLIERE. 385 

rity of thought equal to what is found in the best sa- 
tires of Boileau. It is the very didactic tone of this 
comedy, indeed, which, combined with its want of 
eager, animating interest, made it less popular on its 
representation than some of his inferior pieces. A 
circumstance which occurred on the first night of its 
performance may be worth noticing. In the second 
scene of the first act, a man of fashion, it is well 
known, is represented as soliciting the candid opin- 
ion oiAlceste on a sonnet of his own enditing, though 
he flies into a passion with him, five minutes after, 
for pronouncing an unfavourable judgment. This 
sonnet was so artfully constructed by Moliere, with 
those dazzling epigrammatic points most captivating 
to common ears, that the gratified audience were 
loud in their approbation of w^hat they supposed in- 
tended in good faith by the author. How great was 
their mortification, then, when they heard Alceste 
condemn the whole as puerile, and fairly expose the 
false principles on which it had been constructed. 
Such a rebuke must have carried more weight with 
it than a volume of set dissertation on the principles 
of taste. 

Rousseau has bitterly inveighed against Moliere 
for exposing to ridicule the hero of his Misanthrojpe, 
a high-minded and estimable character. It was told 
to the Due de Montausier, well known for his aus- 
tere virtue, that he was intended as the original of 
the character. Much offended, he attended a rep- 
resentation of the piece, but, on returning, declared 
that " he dared hardly flatter himself the poet had 

C c c 



386 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

intended him so great an honour." This fact, as has 
been well intimated by La Harpe, furnishes the best 
reply to Rousseau's invective. 

The relatiojs in which Moliere stood with his 
wife at rlie time of the appearance of this comedy 
gave to the exhibition a painful interest. The lev- 
ity and extravagance of this lady had for some time 
transcended even those liberal limits which were 
conceded at that day by the complaisance of a 
French husband, and they deeply affected the hap- 
piness of the poet. As he one day communicated 
the subject to his friend Chapelle, the latter strongly 
urged him to confine her person ; a remedy much 
in vogue then for refractory wives, and one, certain- 
ly, if not more efficacious, at least more gallant than 
the " moderate flagellation" authorized by the Eng- 
lish law. He remonstrated on the folly of being 
longer the dupe of her artifices. " Alas !" said the 
unfortunate poet to him, " you have never loved I" 
A separation, however, was at length agreed upon, 
and it was arranged that, while both parties occu- 
pied the same house, they should never meet except 
at the theatre. The respective parts which they 
performed in this piece corresponded precisely with 
their respective situations : tliat of Celimhie, a fas- 
cinating, capricious coquette, insensible to every re 
monstrance of her lover, and selfishly bent on the 
gratification of her own appetites; and that oi Al- 
ceste, perfectly sensible of the duplicity of his mis- 
tress, whom he vainly hopes to reform, and no less 
so of the un worthiness of his own passion, from 



MOLIERE. 387 

which he as vainly hopes to extricate himself. The 
coincidences are too exact to be considered wholly 
accidental. 

If Moliere in his preceding pieces had hit the fol- 
lies and fashionable absurdities of the age, in the 
Tartuffe he flew at still higher game, the most odi- 
ous of all vices, religious hypocrisy. The result 
showed that his shafts were not shot in the dark. 
The first three acts of the Tartuffe, the only ones 
then written, made their appearance at the memo- 
xdihXe fetes known under the name of " The Pleasures 
of the Enchanted Isle," given by Louis the Four- 
teenth at Versailles, in 1664, and of which the in- 
quisitive reader may find a circumstantial narrative 
in the twenty-fifth chapter of Voltaire's history of 
that monarch. The only circumstance which can 
give them a permanent value with posterity is their 
having been the occasion of the earliest exhibition 
of this inimitable comedy. Louis the Fourteenth, 
who, notwithstanding the defects of his education, 
seems to have had a discriminating perception of 
literary beauty, was fully sensible of the merits of 
this production. The Tartuffes, how^ever, who were 
present at the exhibition, deeply stung by the sar- 
casms of the poet, like the foiil birds of night whose 
recesses have been suddenly invaded by a glare of 
light, raised a fearful cry against him, until Louis 
even, whose solicitude for the interests of the Church 
was nowise impaired by his own personal derelic- 
tions, complied with their importunities for imposing 
a prohibition on the public performance of the play. 



388 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

It was, however, privately acted in the presence 
of Monsieur, and afterward of the great Conde. 
Copies of it were greedily circulated in the societies 
of Paris ; and although their unanimous suffrage was 
an inadequate compensation to the author for the 
privations he incurred, it was sufficient to quicken 
the activity of the false zealots, who, under the mask 
of piety, assailed him with the grossest libels. One 
of them even ventured so far as to call upon the 
king to make a public example of him with fire and 
fagot ; another declared that it would be an offence 
to the Deity to allow Mohere, after such an enor- 
mity, " to participate in the sacraments, to be ad- 
mitted to confession, or even to enter the precincts 
of a church, considering the anathemas which it 
had fulminated against the authors of indecent and 
sacrilegious spectacles !" Soon after his sentence 
of prohibition, the king attended the performance 
of a piece entitled Scaramouche Hermite, a piece 
abounding in passages the most indelicate and pro- 
fane. " What is the reason," said he, on retiring, to 
the Prince of Conde, " that the persons so sensibly 
scandalized at Moliere's comedy take no umbrage 
at this 1" " Because," said the prince, " the latter 
only attacks rehgion, while the former attacks them- 
selves:" an answer which may remind one of a 
remark of Bayle in reference to the Decameron, 
which, having been placed on the Index on account 
of its immorality, was, however, allowed to be pub- 
lished in an edition which converted the names of 
tlie ecclesiastics into those of laymen : *' a conces- 



MOLIERE. 389 

sion," says the philosopher, " which shows the priests 
to have been much more solicitous for the interests 
of their own order than for those of heaven." 

Louis, at length convinced of the interested mo- 
tives of the enemies of the Tartuffe, yielded to the 
importunities of the pubhc and removed his prohibi- 
tion of its performance. It accordingly was repre- 
sented, for the first time in public, in August, 1667, 
before an overflowing house, extended to its full 
complement of ^vq acts, but with alterations of the 
names of the piece, the principal personages in it, 
and some of its most obnoxious passages. It was 
entitled The Impostor, and its hero was styled Pa- 
nulfe. On the second evening of the performance, 
however, an interdict arrived from the president of 
the Parliament against the repetition of the perform- 
ance, and, as the king had left Paris in order to join 
his army in Flanders, no immediate redress was to 
be obtained. It was not until two years later, 1669, 
that the Tartuffe, in its present shape, was finally 
allowed to proceed unmolested in its representations. 
It is scarcely necessary to add, that these were at- 
tended with the most brilliant success which its au- 
thor could have anticipated, and to which the in- 
trinsic merits of the piece, and the unmerited perse- 
cutions he had undergone, so well entitled him. 
Forty-four successive representations were scarcely 
sufficient to satisfy the eager curiosity of the public : 
and his orrateful company forced upon Moliere a 
double share of the profits during every repetition 
of its performance for the remainder of his life. Pos- 



390 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITl'CAL MISCELLANIES. 

terity has confirmed the decision of his contempora- 
ries, and it still remains the most admired comedy 
of the French theatre, and will always remain so, 
says a native critic, " as long as taste and hypocrites 
shall endure in France." 

We have been thus particular in our history of 
these transactions, as it affords one of the most in- 
teresting examples on record of undeserved persecu- 
tion with which envy and party spirit have assailed 
a man of letters. No one of Moliere's compositions 
is determined by a more direct moral aim ; nowhere 
has he stripped the mask from vice with a more in- 
trepid hand ; nowhere has he animated his discour- 
ses with a more sound and practical piety. It should 
be added, injustice to the French clergy of that pe- 
riod, that the most eminent prelates at the court ac- 
knowledged the merits of this comedy, and were 
sti'ongly in favour of its representation. 

It is generally known that the amusing scene in 
the first act, where Dorine enlarges so eloquently on 
the good cheer which Tartuffe had made in the ab- 
sence of his host, was suggested to Moliere some 
years previous in Lorraine, by a circumstance which 
took place at the table of Louis the Fourteenth, 
whom Moliere had accompanied in his capacity of 
valet de chamhre. Perefixe, bishop of Rhodez, en- 
tering while the king was at his evening meal, during 
Lent, was invited by him to follow his example ; but 
the bishop declined on the ground that he was ac- 
customed to eat only once during the days of vigil 
and fast. The king, observing one of his attendants 



MOLIERE. 391 

to smile, inquired of him the reason as soon as the 
prelate had withdrawn. The latter informed his 
master that he need he under no apprehensions for 
the health of the good bishop, as he himself had as- 
sisted at his dinner on that day, and then recounted 
to him the various dishes which had been served up. 
The king, who listened with becoming gravity to 
the narration, uttered an exclamation of" Poor man !" 
at the specification of each new item, varying the 
tone of his exclamation in such a manner as to give 
it a highly comic effect. The humour was not lost 
upon our poet, who has transported the same ejacu- 
lations, with much greater effect, into the above-men- 
tioned scene of his play. The king, who did not 
at first recognise the source whence he had derived 
it, on being informed of it, was much pleased, if we 
may believe M. Taschereau, in finding himself even 
thus accidentally associated with the work of a man 
of genius. 

In 1668 Moliere brought forward his Avcu'e, and 
in the following year his amusing comedy of the 
Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in which the folly of une- 
qual alliances is successfully ridiculed and exposed. 
This play was first represented in the presence of 
the court at Chambord. The king maintained du- 
ring its performance an inscrutable physiognomy, 
which made it doubtful what might be his real sen- 
timents respecting it. The same deportment was 
maintained by him during the evening tow^ards the 
author, who was in attendance in his capacity of 
valet de chairibre. The quick-eyed courtiers, the 



392 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

counts and marquises, who had so often smarted un- 
der the lash of the poet, construing this into an ex- 
pression of royal disapprobation, were loud in their 
condemnation of him, and a certain duke boldly af- 
firmed " that he was fast sinking into his second 
childhood, and that, unless some better writer soon 
appeared, French comedy would degenerate into 
mere Italian farce." The unfortunate poet, unable 
to catch a single ray of consolation, was greatly de- 
pressed during the interval of five days which pre- 
ceded the second representation of his piece ; on 
returning from which, the monarch assured him that 
" none of his productions had afforded him greater 
entertainment, and that, if he had delayed expressing 
his opinion on the preceding night, it was from the 
apprehension that his judgment might have been in- 
fluenced by the excellence of the acting." What- 
ever we may think of this exhibition of royal caprice, 
we must admire the suppleness of the courtiers, one 
and all of whom straightway expressed their full con- 
viction of the merits of the comedy, and the duke 
above mentioned added, in particular, that " there 
was a vis comica in all that MoUere ever wrote, to 
which the ancients could furnish no parallel !" What 
exquisite studies for his pencil must Moliere not have 
found in this precious assembly ! 

We have already remarked that the profession of 
a comedian was but lightly esteemed in France at 
this period. Moliere experienced the inconveniences 
resulting from this circumstance even after his splen- 
did literary career had given him undoubted claims 



MOLIERE. 393 

to consideration. Most of oar readers, no doubt, are 
acquainted with the anecdote of Belloc, an agreea- 
ble poet of the court, who, on hearing one of the 
servants in the rojal household refuse to aid the au- 
thor of the Tartuffe in making the king's bed, cour- 
teously requested "the poet to accept his services for 
that purpose." Madame Campan's anecdote of a 
similar courtesy on the part of Louis the Fourteenth 
is also well known, who, when several of these func- 
tionaries refused to sit at table with the comedian, 
kindly invited him to sit down with him, and, call- 
ing in some of his principal courtiers, remarked that 
"he had requested the pleasure of Mohere's compa- 
ny at his own table, as it was not thought quite good 
enough for his officers." This rebuke had the de- 
sired effect. However humihating the reflection 
may be, that genius should have, at any time, stood 
in need of such patronage, it is highly honourable to 
the monarch who could raise himself so far above 
the prejudices of his age as to confer it. 

It was the same unworthy prejudice that had so 
long excluded Moliere from that great object and 
recompense of a French scholar's ambition, a seat in 
the Academy ; a body affecting to maintain a jeal- 
ous watch over the national language and literature, 
which the author of the Misanthrope and the Tar- 
tuffe, perhaps more than any other individual of his 
age, had contributed to purify and advance. Sen- 
sible of this merit, they at length offered him a place 
in their assembly, provided he would renounce his 
profession of a player, and confine himself in future 

Dd D 



394 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

to his literary labours. But the poet replied to his 
friend Boileau, the bearer of this communication, 
that " too many individuals of his company depend- 
ed on his theatrical labours for support to allow him 
for a moment to think of it ;" a reply of infinitely 
more service to his memory than all the academic 
honours that could have been heaped upon him. 
This illustrious body, however, a century after his 
decease, paid him the barren comphment (the only 
one then in their power) of decreeing to him an 
doge^ and of aduiitting his bust within their walls, 
with this inscription upon it : 

" Nothing is wanting to his glory : he was wanting to ours." 

The catalogue of Academicians contemporary 
with Moliere, most of wdiom now rest in sweet ob- 
livion, or, with Cotin and Chapelain, live only in the 
satires of Boileau, shows that it is as little in the pow- 
er of academies to confer immortality on a writer as 
to deprive him of it. 

We have not time to notice the excellent comedy 
of the Femmes Savantes, and some inferior pieces, 
written by our author at a later period of his life, 
and must hasten to the closing scene. He had been 
long affected by a pulmonary complaint, and it was 
only by severe temperance, as we have before stated, 
that he was enabled to preserve even a moderate de- 
gree of health. At the commencement of the year 
1673, his malady sensibly increased. At this very 
season he composed his Malade Imaginaire — the 
most whimsical, and, perhaps, the most amusing of 
the compositions in which he has indulged his rail- 



MOLIERE. 395 

lerj against the faculty. On the seventeenth of Feb- 
ruary, being the day appointed for its fourth repre- 
sentation, his friends would have dissuaded him from 
appearing, in consequence of his increasing indis- 
position ; but he persisted in his design, alleging 
"that more than fifty poor individuals depended for 
their daily bread on its performance." His life fell a 
sacrifice to his benevolence. The exertions which 
he was compelled to make in playing the principal 
part of Argan aggravated his distemper, and as he 
was repeating the wox^jwo in the concluding cer- 
emony, he fell into a convulsion, which he vainly 
endeavoured to disguise from the spectators under a 
forced smile. He was immediately carried to his 
house in the Rue de Richelieu, now No. 34. A vio- 
lent fit of coughing, on his arrival, occasioned the 
rupture of a blood-vessel ; and seeing his end ap- 
proaching, he sent for two ecclesiastics of the parish 
of St. Eustace, to which he belonged, to administer 
to him the last offices of religion. But these worthy 
persons refused their assistance ; and before a third, 
who had been sent for, could arrive, Moliere, suffo- 
cated with the effusion of blood, had expired in the 
arms of his family. 

Harlay de Champvalon, at that time archbishop 
of Paris, refused the rites of sepulture to the deceas- 
ed poet because he was a comedian, and had had the 
misfortune to die without receiving the sacraments. 
This prelate is conspicuous, even in the chronicles 
of that period, for his bold and infamous debaucher- 
ies. It is of him that Madame de Sevigne observes. 



396 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

in one of her letters : " There are two little incon- 
veniences which make it difficult for any one to un- 
dertake his funeral oration — his life and his death." 
Father Gailiard, who at length consented to under- 
take it, did so on the condition that he should not be 
required to say anything of the character of the de- 
ceased. The remonstrance of Louis the Fourteenth 
having induced this person to remove his interdict, 
he privately instructed the curate of St. Eustace not 
to allow the usual service for the dead to be recited 
at the interment. On the day appointed for this cer- 
emony, a number of the rabble assembled before the 
deceased poet's door, determined to oppose it. " They 
knew only," says Voltaire, " that Moliere was a co- 
median, but did not know that he was a philosopher 
and a great man." They had, more probably, been 
collected together by the Tartuffes, his unforgiving 
enemies. The wddow of the poet appeased these 
wretches by throwing money to them from the win- 
dows. In the evening, the body, escorted by a pro- 
cession of about a hundred individuals, the friends 
and intimate acquaintances of the deceased poet, 
each of them bearing a flambeau in his hand, was 
quietly deposited in the cemetery of St. Joseph, with- 
out the ordinary chant, or service of any kind. It 
was not thus that Paris followed to the tomb the 
remains of her late distinguished comedian, Talma. 
Yet Talma was only a comedian, while Moliere, in 
addition to this, had the merit of being the most em- 
inent comic writer whom France had ever produced. 
The different degree of popular civihzation which 



MOLIERE. 397 

this difference of conduct indicates may afford a sub- 
ject of contemplation by no means unpleasing to the 
philanthropist. 

In the year 1792, during that memorable period in 
France when an affectation of reverence for their 
illustrious dead was strangely mingled with the per- 
secution of the hving, the Parisians resolved to ex- 
hume the remains of La Fontaine and Moliere, in 
order to transport them to a more honourable place 
of interment. Of the rehcs thus obtained, it is cer- 
tain that no portion belonged to La Fontaine, and 
it is extremelj^ probable that none did to Moliere. 
Whosesoever they may have been, they did not re- 
ceive the honours for which their repose had been 
disturbed. With the usual fickleness of the period, 
they were shamefully transferred from one place to 
another, or abandoned to neglect for seven years, 
when the patriotic conservator of the Monumens 
Fran^ais succeeded in obtaining them for his collec- 
tion at the Petits Augustins. On the suppression of 
this institution in 1817, the supposed ashes of the 
two poets were, for the last time, transported to the 
spacious cemetery of Pere de la Chaise, where the 
tomb of the author of the Tartuffe is designated by 
an inscription in Latin, which, as if to complete the 
scandal of the proceedings, is grossly mistaken in the 
only fact which it pretends to record, namely, the 
age of the poet at the time of his decease. 

Moliere died soon after entering upon his fifty- 
second year. He is represented to have been some- 
what above the middle stature, and well proportion- 



398 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ed ; his features large, his complexion dark, and his 
black, bushj eyebrows so flexible as to admit of his 
giving an infinetely comic expression to his physiog- 
nomy. He was the best actor of his own genera- 
tion, and, by his counsels, formed the celebrated 
Baron, the best of the succeeding. He played all 
the range of his own characters, from Alceste to Sga- 
narelle, though he seems to have been peculiarly 
fitted for broad comedy. He composed with rapid- 
ity, for which Boileau has happily complimented 
him : 

"Rare et sublime esprit, dont la fertile vein 
Ignore en ecrivant le travail et la peine." 

Unhke in this to Boileau himself, and to Racine, 
the former of whom taught the latter, if we may 
credit his son, " the art of rhyming with difficulty." 
Of course, the verses of Moliere have neither the cor- 
rectness nor the high finish of those of his two illus- 
trious rivals. 

He produced all his pieces, amounting to thirty, 
in the short space of fifteen years. He was in the 
habit of reading these to an old female domestic by 
the name of La Foret, on wliose unsophisticated 
judgment he greatly relied. On one occasion, when 
he attempted to impose upon her the production of 
a brother author, she plainly told him that he had 
never written it. Sir Walter Scott may have had 
this habit of Moliere's in his mind when he introdu- 
ced a similar expedient into his " Chronicles of the 
Canongate." For the same reason, our poet used to 
request the comedians to bring their children with 



MOLIERE. 399 

them when he recited a new play. The pecuHar 
advantage of this humble criticism in dramatic com- 
positions is obvious. Alfieri himself, as he informs 
us, did not disdain to resort to it. 

Moliere's income was very ample, probably not less 
than twenty-five or thirty thousand francs — an im- 
mense sum for that day — ^yet he left but little prop- 
erty. The expensive habits of his wife and his own 
hberality may account for it. One example of this 
is worth recording, as having been singularly oppor- 
tune and well directed. When Racine came up to 
Paris as a young adventurer, he presented to Mohere 
a copy of his first crude tragedy, long since buried in 
oblivion. The latter discerned in it, amid all its im- 
perfections, the latent spark of dramatic genius, and 
he encouraged its author by the present of a hundred 
Louis. This was doing better for him than Corneille 
did, who advised the future authoi' of Phedre to aban- 
don the tragic walk, and to devote himself altogether 
to comedy. Racine recompensed this benefaction 
of his friend, at a later period of his life, by quarrelhng 
with him. 

Moliere was naturally of a reserved and taciturn 
temper, insomuch that his friend Boileau used to 
call him the Contemplateur. Strangers who had ex- 
pected to recognise in his conversation the sallies of 
wit which distinguished his dramas, went away dis- 
appointed. The same thing is related of La Fon- 
taine. The truth is, that Moliere went into society 
as a spectator, not as an actor ; he found there the 
studies for the characters which he was to transport 



400 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

upon the stage, and he occupied himself with observ- 
ing them. The dreamer, La Fontaine, Uved, too, in 
a world of his own creation. His friend, Madame 
de la Sabhere, paid to him this untranslatable com- 
pliment: "En verite, mon cher La Fontaine, vous 
seriez bien bete, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit.'* 
These unseasonable reveries brought him, it may be 
imagined, into many w^iimsical adventures. The 
great Corneille, too, was distinguished by the same 
apathy. A gentleman dined at the same table with 
him for six months without suspecting the author of 
the " Cid." 

The literary reputation of Moliere, and his ami- 
able personal endowments, naturally led him into an 
intimacy with the most eminent wits of the golden 
age in which he lived, but especially with Boileau, 
La Fontaine, and Racine ; and the confidential in- 
tercourse of these great minds, and their frequent re- 
unions for the purposes of social pleasure, bring to 
mind the similar associations at the Mermaid's, Will's 
Coffee-house, and Buttons, which form so pleasing a 
picture in the annals of English literature. It was 
common on these occasions to have a volume of the 
unfortunate Chapelain's epic, then in popular repute, 
lie open upon the table, and if one of the party fell 
into a grammatical blunder, to impose upon him the 
reading of some fifteen or twenty verses of it : "a 
whole page," says Louis Racine, " was sentence of 
death." La Fontaine, in his Psyche, has painted 
his reminiscences of these happy meetings in the col- 
ouring of fond regret; where, "freely discussing such 



MOLIERE. 401 

topics of general literature or personal gossip as might 
arise, they touched lightly upon all, Uke bees passing 
on from flower to flower, criticising the works of 
others without envy, and of one another, when any 
one chanced to fall into the malady of the age, with 
frankness." Alas ! that so rare a union of minds, 
destined to live together through all ages, should have 
been dissolved by the petty jealousies incident to 
common men. 

In these assemblies frequent mention is made of 
Chapelle, the most intimate friend of Moliere, whose 
agreeable verses are read with pleasure in our day, 
and whose cordial manners and sprightly conversa- 
tion made him the deUght of his own. His mercu- 
rial spirits, however, led him into too free an indul- 
gence of convivial pleasures, and brought upon him 
the repeated, though unavailing remonstrances of his 
friends. On one of these occasions, as Boileau was 
urging upon him the impropriety of this indulgence, 
and its inevitable consequences, Chapelle, who re- 
ceived the admonition with great contrition, invited 
his Mentor to withdraw from the pubHc street in 
which they were then walking into a neighbouring 
house, where they could talk over the matter with 
less interruption. Here wine was called for, and, in 
the warmth of discussion, a second bottle being soon 
followed by a third, both parties at length found them- 
selves in a condition which made it advisable to ad- 
journ the lecture to a more fitting occasion. 

Moliere enjoyed also the closest intimacy with the 
great Conde, the most distinguished ornament of the 

Ee E 



402 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

court of Louis the Fourteenth ; to such an extent, 
indeed, that the latter directed that the poet should 
never be refused admission to him, at whatever hour 
he might choose to pay his visit. His regard for his 
friend was testified by his remark, rather more can- 
did than courteous, to an abbe of his acquaintance, 
who had brought him an epitaph of his own writing 
upon the deceased poet. " Would to Heaven," said 
the prince, "that he were in a condition to bring me 
yours !" 

We have already wandered beyond the limits 
which we had assigned to ourselves for an abstract 
of Moliere's literary labours, and of the most interest- 
ing anecdotes in his biography. Without entering, 
therefore, into a criticism on his writings, of which 
the public stand in no need, we shall dismiss the sub- 
ject with a few brief reflections on their probable in- 
fluence, and on the design of the author in producing 
them. 

The most distinguished French critics, with the 
overweening partiality in favour of their own nation, 
so natural and so universal, placing Moliere by com- 
mon consent at the head of their own comic writers, 
have also claimed for him a pre-eminence over those 
of every other age and country. A. W. Schlegel, a 
very competent judge in these matters, has degraded 
him, on the other hand, from the walks of high com- 
edy to the writer of "buffoon farces, for which his 
genius and inclination seem to have essentially fitted 
him ;" adding, moreover, that "his characters are not 
drawn from nature, but from the fleeting and super- 



MOLIERE. 403 

ficial forms of fashionable life." This is a hard sen- 
tence, accommodated to the more forcible illustration 
of the peculiar theory which the German writer has 
avowed throughout his work, and which, however 
reasonable in its first principles, has led him into as 
exaggerated an admiration of the romantic models 
which he prefers, as disparagement of the classical 
school which he detests. It is a sentence, moreover, 
upon which some eminent critics in his own coun- 
try, who support his theory in the main, have taken 
the liberty to demur. 

That a large proportion of Moliere's pieces are 
conceived in a vein of broad, homely merriment, 
rather than in that of elevated comedy, abounding in 
forced situations, high caricature, and practical jokes; 
in the knavish, intriguing valets of Plautus and Ter- 
ence ; in a compound of that good-nature and irri- 
tabihty, shrewdness and credulity, which make up 
the dupes of Aristophanes, is very true ; but that a 
writer, distinguished by his deep reflection, his pure 
taste, and nice observation of character, should have 
preferred this to the higher walks of his art, is abso- 
lutely incredible. He has furnished the best justifi- 
cation of himself in an apology, which a contempo- 
rary biographer reports him to have made to some 
one who censured him on this very ground : " If I 
wrote simply for fame," said he, " I should manage 
very difierently ; but I write for the support of my 
company. I must not address myself, therefore, to a 
few people of education, but to the mob. And this 
latter class of gentry take very little interest in a 



404 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

continued elevation of style and sentiment." With 
all these imperfections and lively absurdities, howev- 
er, there is scarcely one of Moliere's minor pieces 
which does not present us with traits of character 
that come home to every heart, and felicities of ex- 
pression that, from their truth, have come to be pro- 
verbial. 

With regard to the objection that his characters 
are not so much drawn from nature as from the lo- 
"cal manners of the age, if it be meant that they are 
not acted upon by those deep passions which engross 
the whole soul, and which, from this intensity, have 
more of a tragic than a comic import in them, but 
are rather drawn from the foibles and follies of ordi- 
nary hfe, it is true ; but then these last are likely to 
be quite as permanent, and, among civihzed nations, 
quite as universal as the former. And who has ex- 
posed them with greater freedom, or with a more 
potent ridicule than Moliere ? Love, under all its 
thousand circumstances, its quarrels, and reconcilia- 
tions ; vanity, humbly suing for admiration under the 
guise of modesty ; whimsical contradictions of pro- 
fession and habitual practice ; the industry with which 
the lower classes ape, not the virtues, but the foUies 
of their superiors ; the affectation of fashion, taste, 
science, or anything but what the party actually pos- 
sesses ; the esprit de corps, which leads us to feel an 
exalted respect for our own profession, and a sover- 
eign contempt for every other ; the friendly adviser, 
who has an eye to his own interest ; the author, who 
seeks your candid opinion, and quarrels with you 



MOLIERE. 405 

when you have given it ; the fair friend, who kindly 
sacrifices your reputation for a jest ; the hypocrite, 
under every aspect, who deceives the world or him- 
self — these form the various and motley panorama of 
character which Moliere has transferred to his can- 
vass, and which, though mostly drawn from cultiva- 
ted life, must endiu'e as long as society shall hold 
together. 

Indeed, Moliere seems to have possessed all the 
essential requisites for excelling in genteel comedy : 
a pure taste, an acute perception of the ridiculous, 
the tone of elegant dialogue, and a wit brilliant and 
untiring as Congreve's, but which, instead of wast- 
ing itself like his, in idle flashes of merriment, is uni- 
formly directed with a moral or philosophical aim.. 
This obvious didactic purpose, in truth, has been 
censured as inconsistent with the spirit of the drama, 
and as belonging rather to satire ; but it secured to 
him an influence over the literature and the opinions 
of his own generation which has been possessed by 
no other comic writer of the moderns. 

He was the first to recall his countrymen from 
the vapid hyperbole and puerile conceits of the an- 
cient farces, and to instruct them in the maxim 
which Boileau has since condensed into a memora- 
ble verse, that "nothing is beautiful but what is nat- 
ural." We have already spoken of the reformation 
which one of his early pieces effected in the admi- 
rers of the Hotel de Ramhouillet and its absurdities ; 
and when this confederacy afterward rallied under 
an affectation of science, as it had before done of 



406 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

letters, he again broke it with his admirable satire 
of the Femmes Savantes. We do not recollect any 
similar revolution effected by a single effort of genius, 
unless it be that brought about by the Baviad and 
Mceviad. But Mr. Gifford, in the Delia- Cruscan 
school, but " broke a butterfly upon the wheel," in 
comparison with those enemies, formidable by rank 
and talent, whom Mohere assailed. We have no- 
ticed, in its proper place, the influence which his 
writings had in compelling the medical faculty of 
bis day to lay aside the affected deportment, tech- 
nical jargon, and other mummeries then in vogue, 
by means of the public derision to which he had 
deservedly exposed them. In the same manner, he 
so successfully ridiculed the miserable dialectics, 
pedantry, and intolerance of the schoolmen, in his 
diverting dialogues between Dr. Marphurius and 2>r. 
Pancrace, that he is said to have completely defeat- 
ed the serious efforts of the University for obtaining 
a confirmation of the decree of 1624, which had 
actually prohibited, under pain of death, the promul- 
gation of any opinion contrary to the doctrines of 
Aristotle. The arret burlesque of his friend Boileau, 
at a later period, if we may trust the Menagiana, 
had a principal share in preventing a decree of the 
Parliament against the philosophy of Descartes. It 
is difficult to estimate the influence of our poet's sa- 
tire on the state of society in general, and on those 
higher ranks in particular whose affectations and 
pretensions he assailed with such pertinacious hos- 
tility. If he did not reform them, he at least depri- 



MOLIERE. 407 

ved them of their fascination and much of their mis- 
chievous influence, by holding them up to the con- 
tempt and laughter of the public. Sometimes, it 
must be admitted, though very rarely, in effecting 
this object, he so far transgressed the bounds of de- 
corum as to descend even to personalities. 

From this view of the didactic purpose proposed 
by Moliere in his comedies, it is obviously difficult 
to institute a comparison betv^een them and those 
of our English dramatists, or, rather, of Shakspeare, 
who may be taken as their representative. The 
latter seems to have had no higher end in view than 
mere amusement ; he took a leaf out of the great 
volume of human nature as he might find it ; nor 
did he accommodate it to the illustration of any 
moral or literary theorem. The former, on the oth- 
er hand, manifests such a direct perceptive purpose 
as to give to some of his pieces the appearance of 
satires rather than of comedies ; argument takes 
place of action, and the pro and con of the matter 
are discussed with all the formality of a school ex- 
ercise. This essentially diminishes the interest of 
some of his best plays, the Misanthrope and the 
Femmes Savautes, for example, which for this reason 
seem better fitted for the closet than the stage, and 
have long since ceased to be favourites with the 
public. This want of interest is, moreover, aggra- 
vated by the barrenness of action visible in many of 
Moliere's comedies, where he seems only to have 
sought an apology for bringing together his coteries 
of gentlemen and ladies for the purpose of exhibit- 



408 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ing their gladiatorial dexterity in conversation. Not 
so witli the EngUsh dramatist, whose boundless in- 
vention crovi^ds his scene wdth incidents that hurry 
us along with breathless interest, but which sadly 
scandahze the lover of the unities. 

In conformity with his general plan, too, Shaks- 
peare brings before us every variety of situation — 
the court, the camp, and the cloister ; the busy hum 
of populous cities, or the wild solitude of the forest 
— presenting us with pictures of rich and romantic 
beauty, which could not fall within the scope of his 
rival, and allowing himself to indulge in the unbound- 
ed revelry of an imagination which Moliere did not 
possess. The latter, on the other hand, an attentive 
observer of man as he is found in an over-refined 
state of society, in courts and crowded capitals, cop- 
ied his minutest lineaments with a precision that 
gives to his most general sketches the air almost of 
personal portraits; seasoning, moreover, his discours- 
es with shrewd hints and maxims of worldly policy. 
Shakspeare^s genius led him rather to deal in bold 
touches than in this nice delineation. He describes 
classes rather than individuals; he touches the springs 
of the most intense passions. The daring of ambi- 
tion, the craving of revenge, the deep tenderness of 
love, are all materials in his hands for comedy ; and 
this gives to some of his admired pieces — his "Mer- 
chant of Venice" and his " Measure for Measure," 
for example — a solemnity of colouring that leaves 
them only to be distinguished from tragedy by their 
more fortunate termination. Moliere, on the con- 



MOLIERE. 409 

trary, sedulously excludes from his plays whatever 
can impair their comic interest. And when, as he 
has done very rarely, he aims directly at vice instead 
of folly (in the Tartuffe, for instance), he studies to 
exhibit it under such ludicrous points of view as 
shall excite the derision rather than the indignation 
of his audience. 

But whatever be the comparative merits of these 
great masters, each must be allowed to have attained 
complete success in his way. Comedy, in the hands 
of Shakspeare, exhibits to us man, not only as he is 
moved by the petty vanities of life, but by deep and 
tumultuous passion ; in situations which it requires all 
the invention of the poet to devise and the richest 
colouring of eloquence to depict. But if the object 
of comedy, as has been said, be " to correct the fol- 
lies of the age, by exposing them to ridicule," who 
then has equalled Moliere ? 

Fff 



410 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY.* 

OCTOBER, 18 24. 

The characteristics of an Italian school are no- 
where so discernible in English literary history as 
under the reign of Elizabeth. At the period when 
England was most strenuous in breaking off her spir- 
itual relations with Italy, she cultivated most closely 
her intellectual. It is hardly necessary to name ei- 
ther the contemporary dramatists, or Surrey, Sidney, 
and Spenser, the former of whom derived the plots 
of many of their most popular plays, as the latter did 
the forms, and frequently the spirit of their poetical 
compositions, from Italian models. The translations 
of the same period were, in several instances, superior 
to any which have been since produced. Harring- 
ton's version of the " Orlando Furioso," with all its 
inaccuracy, is far superior to the cumbrous monoto- 
ny of Hoole. Of Fairfax, the elegant translator of 
Tasso, it is enough to say that he is styled by Dry- 
den " the poetical father of Waller," and quoted by 
him, in conjunction with Spenser, as " one of the 
great masters in our language." The popularity of 
the Italian was so great even in Ascham's day, who 
did not survive the first half of Elizabeth's reign, as 
to draw from the learned schoolmaster much peevish 

* 1. " The Orlando Innamorato ; translated into prose and verse, from 
the Italian of Francesco Berni. By W. S. Rose." 8vo, p. 279. Lon- 
don, 1823. 

2. '< The Orlando Furioso ; translated into verse from the Italian of 
Ludovico Ariosto, By W. S. Rose." Vol. i., 8vo. London, 1823. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 411 

animadversion upon What he terms " the enchant- 
ments of Circe, fond books of late translated out of 
TtaUan into English, and sold in every shop in Lon- 
don." It gradually lost this wide authority during 
the succeeding century. This wsls but natural. Be- 
fore the time of Elizabeth, all the light of learning 
which fell upon the world had come from Italy, and 
our own literature, like a young and tender plant, in- 
sensibly put forth its branches most luxuriantly in the 
direction whence it felt this invigorating influence. 
As it grew in years and hardihood, it sent its fibres 
deeper into its own soil, and drew thence the nourish- 
ment which enabled it to assume its fair and full 
proportions. Milton, it is true, the brightest name on 
the poetical records of that period, cultivated it with 
eminent success. Any one acquainted with the wri- 
tings of Dante, Pulci, and Tasso, will understand the 
value and the extent of Milton's obhgationsto the Ital- 
ian. He was far from desiring to conceal them, and 
he has paid many a tribute "of melodious verse" to the 
sources from which he drew so much of the nourish- 
ment of his exalted genius. "To imitate, as he has 
done," in the language of Boileau, " is not to act the 
part of a plagiary, but of a rival." Milton is, more- 
over, one of the few writers who have succeeded so 
far in comprehending the niceties of foreign tongue 
as to be able to add something to its poetical wealth, 
and his Italian sonnets are written with such purity 
as to have obtained commendations from the Tuscan 
critics.* 

* Milton, in his treatise on The Reason of Church Government, alludes 



412 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Boileau, who set the current of French taste at 
this period, had a considerable contempt for that of 
his neighbours. He pointed one of his antithetical 
couplets at the " tinsel of Tasso" (" clinquant du 
Tasse"*'), and in another he ridiculed the idea of 
epics, in which "the devil was always blustering 
against the heavens."f The English admitted the 
sarcasm of Boileau with the cold commentary of 
Addison ;{ and the " clinquant du Tasse" became a 
cant term of reproach upon the whole body of Ital- 
ian letters. The French w^ent still farther, and af- 
terward, applying the sarcasm of their critic to Milton 
as well as to Tasso, rejected both the poets upon the 
same principles. The French did the English as 
much justice as they did the Italians. No great 
change of opinion in this matter took place in Eng- 
land during the last century. The Wartons and 
Gray had a just estimation of this beautiful tongue, 
but Dr. Johnson, the dominant critic of that day, 
seems to have understood the language but imper- 
fectly, and not to have much relished in it what he 
understood. 

In the present age of intellectual activity, attention 
is so generally bestowed on all modern languages 
which are ennobled by a literature, that it is not sin- 
gular an acquaintance with ihe Italian in particular 

modestly enough to his Italian pieces, and the commendations bestowed 
upon them. " Other things, which I had shifted in scarcity of books and 
conveniencies to hatch up among them, were received with written en- 
comiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side 
the Alps." * Satire IX. 

t L'Art Poetique, c. III. t Spectator, No. VI. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY 413 

should be widely diffused. Great praise, however, is 
due to the labours of Mr. Roscoe. There can be 
little doubt that his elaborate biographies of the Me- 
dici, which contain as much literary criticism as his- 
torical narrative, have mainly contributed to the 
promotion of these studies among his countrymen. 
These works have of late met with much flippant 
criticism in some of their leading journals. In Italy 
they have been translated, are now cited as authori- 
ties, and have received the most encomiastic notices 
from several eminent scholars. These facts afford 
conclusive testimony of their merits. The name of 
Mathias is well known to every lover of the Itahan 
tongue ; his poetical productions rank with those of 
Milton in merit, and far exceed them in quantity. 
To conclude, it is not many years since Gary gave 
to his countrymen his very extraordinary version of 
the father of Tuscan poetry, and Rose is now swell- 
ing the catalogue with translations of the two most 
distinguished chivalrous epics of Italy. 

Epic romance has continued to be a great favour- 
ite in that country ever since its first introduction 
into the polished circles of Florence and Ferrara, to- 
wards the close of the fifteenth century. It has held 
much the same rank in its ornamental literature 
which the drama once enjoyed in the English, and 
which historical novel-writing maintains now. It 
hardly seems credible that an enlightened people 
should long continue to take great satisfaction in po- 
ems founded on the same extravagant fictions, and 
spun out to the appalling length of twenty, thirty, 



414 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

nay, forty cantos of a thousand verses each. But 
the Itahans, like most Southern nations, dehght ex- 
ceedingly in the uncontrolled play of the imagina- 
tion, and they abandon themselves to all its briUiant 
illusions, with no other object in view than mere rec- 
reation. An Englishman looks for a moral, or, at 
least, for some sort of instruction, from the wildest 
work of fiction. But an Itahan goes to it as he 
would go to the opera- — to get impressions rather 
than ideas. He is extremely sensible to the fine 
tones of his native language, and, under the combi- 
ned influence produced by the colouring of a lavish 
fancy and the music of a voluptuous versification, he 
seldom stoops to a cold analysis of its purpose or its 
probability. 

Romantic fiction, however, which flourished so 
exuberantly under a warm Southern sky, was trans- 
planted from the colder regions of Normandy and 
England. It is remarkable that both these countries, 
in which it had its origin, should have ceased to cul- 
tivate it at the very period when the perfection of 
their respective languages would have enabled them 
to do so with entire success. We believe this re- 
mark requires no qualification in regard to France. 
Spenser affords one illustrious exception among the 
English.* 

* The influence, however, of the old Norman romances may be dis- 
covered in the productions of a much later period. Their incredible 
length required them to be broken up into fyttes, or cantos, by the min- 
strel, who recited them with the accompaniment of a harp, in the same 
manner as the epics of Homer, broken into rhapsodies, were chanted by 
the bards of Ionia. The minstrel who could thus beguile the tedium of 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 415 

It was not until long after the extinction of this 
species of writing in the North that it reappeared in 
Italy. The commercial habits, and the Republican 
institutions of the Italians in the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, were most unfavourable to the 
spirit of chivalry, and, consequently, to the fables 
which grew out of it. The three patriarchs of their 
literature, moreover, by the light which, in this dark 
period, they threw over other walks of imagination, 
turned the attention of their countrymen from those 
of romance. Dante, indeed, who resembled Milton 
in so many other particulars, showed a similar pred- 
ilection for the ancient tales of chivalry. His Coin- 
media contains several encomiastic allusions to them, 
but, like the English bard, he contented himself with 
these, and chose a subject better suited to his ambi- 
tious genius and inflexible temper.* His poem, it is 
true, was of too eccentric a character to be widely 



a winter's evening was a welcome guest at the baronial castle and in 
the hall of the monastery. As Greek and Roman letters were revived, 
the legends of chivalry fell into disrepute, and the minstrel gradually re- 
treated to the cottage of the peasant, who was still rude enough to relidl 
his simple melody. But the long romance was beyond the comprehen- 
sion or the taste of the rustic. It therefore gave way to less complica- 
ted narratives, and from its wreck may be fairly said to have arisen those 
Border songs and ballads which form the most beautiful collection of 
rural minstrelsy that belongs to any age or country. 

* Milton's poetry abounds in references to the subjects of romantic 
fable ; and in his " Epitaphium Damonis,^' he plainly intimates his inten- 
tion of writing an epic on the story of Arthur. It may be doubted 
whether he would have succeeded on such a topic. His austere char- 
acter would seem to have been better fitted to feel the impulses of reli- 
gious enthusiasm than those of chivalry ; and England has no reason to 
regret that her most sublime poet was reserved for the age of Cromwell 
instead of the romantic reign of Elizabeth. 



416 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. ' 

imitated,* and both Boccaccio and Petrarch, with 
less talent, had a more extensive influence over the 
taste of their nation. The garrulous graces of the 
former and the lyrical finish of the latter are still 
soHcited in the Hghter compositions of Italy. Last- 
ly, the discoveries of ancient manuscripts at home, 
and the introduction of others from Constantinople, 
when that rich depository of Grecian science fell 
into the hands of the barbarian, gave a new direc- 
tion to the intellectual enterprise of Itahan scholars, 
and withdrew them almost wholly from the farther 
cultivation of their infant literature. 

Owing to these circumstances, the introduction of 
the chivalrous epoque was protracted to the close 
of the fifteenth century, when its first successful 
specimens were produced at the accomplished court 
of the Medici. The encouragement extended by 
this illustrious family to every branch of intellectual 
culture has been too often the subject of encomium 
to require from us any particular animadversion. 
Lorenzo, especially, by uniting in his own person 
the scholarship and talent which he so liberally re- 
warded in others, contributed more than all to the 
effectual promotion of an enhghtened taste among 
his countrymen. Even his amusements were sub- 

* The best imitation of the " Divina Commcdia" is probably the "Can- 
tiba in morte di Ugo Basville,'^ by the most eminent of the living Italian 
poets, Monti. His talent for vigorous delineation by a single coup de 
pinceau is eminently Dantesque, and the plan of his poem is the exact 
counterpart of that of the "Inferno.'" Instead of a mortal descending 
into the regions of the damned, one of their number (the spirit of Bas- 
ville, a Frenchman) is summoned back to the earth, to behold the crimes 
and miseries of his native country during the period of the Revolution. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 417 

servient to it, and the national literature may be 
fairly said, at this day, to retain somewhat of the 
character communicated to it by his elegant recrea- 
tions. His delicious villas at Fiesole and Cajano 
are celebrated by the scholars, w^ho, in the silence 
of their shades, pursued with him the studies of his 
favourite philosophy and of poetry. Even the sen- 
sual pleasures of the banquet were relieved by the 
inventions of wit and fancy. Lyrical composition, 
which, notwithstanding its peculiar adaptation to the 
flexible movements of the Italian tongue, had fallen 
into neglect, was revived, and, together w4th the first 
eloquent productions of the romantic muse, was re- 
cited at the table of Lorenzo. 

Of the guests who frequented it, Pulci and Poli- 
tian are the names most distinguished, and the only 
ones connected with our present subject. The lat- 
ter of these was received into the family of Lorenzo 
as the preceptor of his children, an office for which 
he seems to have been better qualified by his extra- 
ordinary attainments than by his disposition. What- 
ever may have been the asperity of his temper, how- 
ever, his poetical compositions breathe the perfect 
spirit of harmony. The most remarkable of these, 
distinguished as the " Verses of Politian" (Stanze di 
Poliziano), is a brief fragment of an epic, whose 
purpose was to celebrate the achievements of Juhan 
de Medici, a younger brother of Lorenzo, at a tour- 
nament exhibited at Florence in 1468. This would 
appear but a meager basis for the structure of a 
great poem. Politian, however, probably in conse- 

Ggg 



418 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

quence of the untimely death of Julian, his hero, 
abandoned it in the middle of the second canto, 
even before he had reached the event w^hich was to 
constitute the subject of his story. 

The incidents of the poem thus abruptly termi- 
nated are of no great account. We have a por- 
trait of Julian, a hunting expedition, a love adven- 
ture, a digression into the island of Venus, which 
takes up about half the canto, and a vision of the 
hero, which ends just as the tournament, the sub- 
ject of the piece, is about to begin, and with it, like 
the " fabric of a vision," ends the poem also. In 
this short space, however, the poet has concentrated 
all the beauties of his art, the melody of a musical 
ear, and the inventions of a plastic fancy. His isl- 
and of love, in particular, is emblazoned with those 
gorgeous splendours, which have since been borrow- 
ed for the enchanted gardens of Alcina, Armida, and 
Acrasia. 

But this little fragment is not recommended, at 
least to an English reader, so much by its Oriental 
pomp of imagery as by its more quiet and delicate 
pictures of external nature. Brilliancy of imagina- 
tion is the birthright of the Italian poet, as much as 
a sober, contemplative vein is of the EngHsh. This 
is the characteristic of almost all their best and 
most popular poetry during the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries. The two great poets of the four- 
teenth approach much nearer to the English char- 
acter. Dante shows not only deeper reflection than 
is common with his countrymen, but in parts of his 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 419 

work, in the Purgatorio more especially, manifests 
a sincere relish for natm*al beauty, by his most accu- 
rate pictures of rural objects and scenery. Petrarch 
cherished the recollections of an unfortunate pas- 
sion, until, we may say, without any mystical per- 
version of language, it became a part of his intellect- 
ual existence.* This gave a tender and melancholy 
expression to his poems, more particularly to those 
written after the death of Laura, quite as much 

* Whatever may be thought of the speculations of the Abbe de Sade, 
no doubt can be entertained of the substantial existence of Laura, or of 
Petrarch's passion for her. Indeed, independently of the internal evi- 
dence atForded by his poetry, such direct notices of his mistress are scat- 
tered through his " Letters" and serious prose compositions, that it is 
singular there should ever have existed a skepticism on these points. 
Ugo Foscolo, the well-known author of " Jacoho Ortis,^^ has lately pub- 
lished an octavo volume, entitled '^Essays on Petrarch.''^ Among other 
particulars, showing the unbounded influence that Laura de Sade obtained 
over the mind of her poetical lover, he quotes the following memoran- 
dum, made by Petrarch two months after her decease, in his private 
manuscript copy of Virgil, now preserved in the Ambrosian library at 
Milan : 

" It was in the early days of my youth, on the sixth of April, in the 
morning, and in the year 1327, that Laura, distinguished by her own vir- 
tues, and celebrated in my verses, first blessed my eyes in the Church 
of Santa Clara, at Avignon ; and it was in the same city, on the sixth 
of the very same month of April, at the very same hour in the morning, 
in the year 1348, that this bright luminary was withdrawn from our sight, 
when I was at Verona, alas ! ignorant of my calamity. The remains of 
her chaste and beautiful body were deposited in the Church of the Cor- 
deliers on the evening of the same day. To preserve the afflicting re- 
membrance, I have taken a bitter pleasure in recording it, particularly in 
this book, which is most frequently before my eyes, in order that nothing 
in this world may have any farther attraction for me ; that this great 
attachment to life being dissolved, I may, by frequent reflection, and a 
proper estimation of our transitory existence, be admonished that it is 
high time for me to think of quitting this earthly Babylon, which I trust it 
will not be difficult for me, with a strong and manly courage, to accom- 
plish."— P. 35. 



420 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

English as Italian. Love furnishes the great theme 
and hnpulse to the Italian poet. It is not too much 
to say that all their principal versifiers have written 
under the inspiration of a real or pretended passion. 
It is to them what a less showy and less exclusive 
sensibility is to an Englishman. The latter ac- 
knowledges the influence of many other affections 
and relations in life. The death of a friend is far 
more likely to excite his muse than the smiles or 
fi'owns of his mistress. The Italian seldom dwells 
on melancholy reminiscences, but wiites under the 
impulse of a living and ardent passion. Petrarch 
did both ; but in the poetry which he composed after 
the death of his mistress, exalted as it is by devo- 
tional sentiment, he deviated from the customs of 
his nation, and adopted an English tone of feeling. 
A graver spirit of reflection and a deeper sympathy 
for the unobtrusive beauties of nature are observable 
in some of their later writers ; but these are not 
primitive elements in the Italian character. Gay, 
brilliant, imaginative, are the epithets which best 
indicate the character of their literature during its 
most flourishing periods ; and the poetry of Italy 
seems to reflect as clearly her unclouded skies and 
glowing landscape, as that of England does the tran- 
quil and somewhat melancholy complexion of her 
climate. 

The verses of Politian, to return from our digres- 
sion, contain many descriptions distinguished by the 
calm, moral beauty of which we have been speak- 
ing. Resemblances mav be traced between these 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 421 

passages and the writings of some of our best Eng- 
lish poets. The descriptive poetry of Gray and of 
Goldsmith, particularly, exhibits a remarkable coin- 
cidence with that of Politian in the enumeration of 
rural images. The stanza cxxi., setting forth the 
descent of Cupid into the island of Venus, may be 
cited as having suggested a much admired simile in 
Gay's popular ballad, Black-eyed Susan, since the 
English verse is almost a metaphrase of the Italian : 

*' Or poi che ad ail tese ivi pervenne, 

Forte le scosse, e giu calossi a pionrbo, 
Tutto serrato nelle sacre penne, 
Come a suo nido fa lieto Colombo." 
" So the sweet lark, high poised in air, 
Shuts close his pinions to his breast, 
If chance his mate's shrill call he hear, 
And drops at once into her nest." 

These " Stanze" were the first example of a happy- 
cultivation of Italian verse in the fifteenth century. 
The scholars of that day composed altogether in 
Latin. Politian, as he grew older, disdained this 
abortive production of his youthful muse, and relied 
for his character with posterity on his Latin poems 
and his elaborate commentaries upon the ancient 
classics. Petrarch looked for immortality to his "Af- 
rica," as did Boccaccio to his learned Latin disqui- 
sition upon ancient mythology.* Could they now, 
after the lapse of more than four centuries, revisit the 

* "De Genealogia Deorum.'" — The Latin writings of Boccaccio and Pe- 
trarch may be considered the foundation of their fame with their contem- 
poraries. The coronation of the latter in the Roman capitol was a 
homage paid rather to his achievements in an ancient tongue than to any 
in his own. He does not even notice his Italian lyrics in his "Letters to 
Posterity. ^^ 



422 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

world, how would they be astonished, perhaps mor- 
tified, the former to find that he was remembered 
only as the sonnetteer, and the latter as the novehst? 
The Latin prose of Politian may be consulted by an 
antiquary; his Latin poetry must be admired by 
scholars of taste ; but his few Italian verses constitute 
the basis of his high reputation at this day with the 
great body of his counti-ymen. He wrote several 
lyrical pieces and a short pastoral drama (Orfeo),the 
first of a species which afterward grew into such re- 
pute under the hands of Tasso and Guarini. All of 
these bear the same print of his genius. One fcan- 
not but regret that so rare a mind should, in con- 
formity with the perverse taste of his age, have aban- 
doned the freshness of a Uving tongue for the un- 
grateful culture of a dead one. His " Stanze," the 
mere prologue of an epic, still survive amid the com- 
plete and elaborate productions of succeeding poets ; 
they may be compared to the graceful portico of some 
unfinished temple, which time and taste have respect- 
ed, and which remains as in the days of its architect, 
a beautiful ruin. 

Luigi Pulci, the other eminent poet whom we 
mentioned as a frequent guest at the table of Loren- 
zo de' Medici, was of a noble family, and the young- 
est of three brothers, all of them even more distin- 
guished by their accomplishments than by birth. 
There seems to be nothing worthy of particular rec- 
ord in his private history. He is said to have pos- 
sessed a frank and merry disposition, and, to judge 
from his great poem, as well as from some lighter 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 423 

pieces of burlesque satire, which he bandied with 
one of his friends, whom he was in the habit of meet- 
ing at the house of Lorenzo, he was not particularly 
fastidious in his humour. His Morgante Maggiore 
is reported to have been written at the request of Lo- 
renzo's mother, and recited at his table. It is a gen- 
uine epic of chivalry, containing twenty-eight cantos, 
founded on the traditionary defeat, the " dolorosa 
rotta" of Charlemagne and his peers in the Valley 
of Roncesvalles. It adheres much more closely than 
any of the other Italian romances to the lying chron- 
icle of Turpin. 

It may appear singular that the intention of the 
author should not become apparent in the course of 
eight-and-twenty cantos ; but it is a fact, that schol- 
ars both at home and abroad have long disputed 
whether the poem is serious or satirical. Crescim- 
beni styles the author " modesto e moderato," while 
Tiraboschi expressly charges him with the deliber- 
ate design of ridiculing Scripture, and Voltaire, in 
his preface, cites the Morgante as an apology for his 
profligate " Pucelle." It cannot be denied that the 
story abounds in such ridiculous eccentricities as 
give it the air of a parody upon the marvels of ro- 
mance. The hero, Morgante, is a converted infidel, 
"un gigante smisurato," whose formidable weapon 
is a bell-clapper, and who, after running through 
some twenty cantos of gigantic valour and mounte- 
bank extravagance, is brought to an untimely end by 
a wound in the heel, not from a Trojan arrow, but 
from the bite of a crab ! We doubt, however, 



424 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

whether Pulci intended his satirical shafts for the 
Christian faith. Liberal allowance is to be conce- 
ded for the fashion of his age. Nothing is more 
frequent in the productions of that period than such 
irreverent freedoms with the most sacred topics as 
would be quite shocking in ours. Such freedoms, 
however, cannot reasonably be imputed to profanity, 
or even levity, since numerous instances of them 
occur in works of professed moral tendency, as in 
the mysteries and moralities, for example, those sol- 
emn deformities of the ancient French and English 
drama. The chronicle of Turpin, the basis of Pul- 
ci's epic, which, though a fraud, was a pious one, 
invented by some priest to celebrate the triumphs of 
the Christian arms, is tainted with the same inde- 
cent familiarities.* 

Tempora mutantur. In a scandalous pasquinade 
published by Lord Byron in the first number of his 
Liberal, there is a verse describing St. Peter offici- 
ating as the doorkeeper of heaven. Pulci has a 
similar one in the Morgante (canto xxvi., st. 91), 
which, no doubt, furnished the hint to his lordship, 
who has often improved upon the ItaUan poets. 
Both authors describe St. Peter's dress and vocation 

* This spurious document of the twelfth century contains, in a copy 
which we have now before us, less than sixty pages. It has neither the 
truth of history nor the beauty of fiction. It abounds in commonplace 
prodigies, and sets forth Charlemagne's wars and his defeat in the valley 
of Roncesvalles, an event which probably never happened. Insignifi- 
cant as it is in every other respect, however, it is the seed from which 
has sprung up those romantic fictions which adorned the rude age of 
the Normans, and which flourished in such wide luxuriance under Italian 
culture. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 425 

with the most whimsical minuteness. In the Ital- 
ian, the passage, introduced into the midst of a sol- 
emn, elaborate description, has all the appearance 
of being told in very good faith. No one will ven- 
ture to put so charitable a construction upon his 
lordship's motives. 

Whatever may have been the intention of Pulci 
in the preceding portion of the work, its concluding 
cantos are animated by the genuine spirit of Chris- 
tian heroism. The rear of Charlemagne's army is 
draw^n into an ambuscade by the treachery of his 
confidant Ganelon. Roncesvalles, a valley in the 
heart of the Pyrenees, is the theatre of action, and 
Orlando, with the flower of French chivalry, perish- 
es there, overpow^ered by the Saracens. The battle 
is told in a sublime epic tone worthy of the occasion. 
The cantos xxvi., xxvii., containing it, are filled 
with a continued strain of high religious enthusiasm, 
with the varying, animating bustle of a mortal con- 
flict, wdth the most solemn and natural sentiment 
suggested by the horror of the situation. Orlando's 
character rises into that of the divine warrior. His 
speech at the opening of the action, his lament over 
his unfortunate army, his melancholy reflections on 
the battle-field the night after the engagement, are 
conceived with such sublimity and pathos as attest 
both the poetical talent of Pulci and the grandeur 
and capacity of his subject. Yet the Morgante, the 
greater part of which is so ludicrous, is the only em- 
inent Italian epic which has seriously described the 
celebrated rout at Roncesvalles. 
Hhh 



> 



426 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Pulci's poem is not much read by the ItaUans. 
Its style, in general, is too unpolished for the fastid- 
ious delicacy of a modern ear, but as it abounds in 
the oldfashioned proverbialisms {rihoholi) of Flor- 
ence, it is greatly prized by the Tuscan purists. 
These famihar sayings, the elegant slang of the 
Florentine mob, have a value among the Itahan 
scholars, at least among a large faction of them, 
much like that of old coins with a virtuoso : the 
more rare and rusty, the better. They give a high 
relish to many of their ancient v^riters, w^ho, with- 
out other merit than their antiquity, are cited as au- 
thorities in their vocabulary.* These riboboli are 
to be met with most abundantly in their old novelle, 
those, especially, which are made up of familiar dia- 
logue between the lower classes of citizens. Boc- 
caccio has very many such ; Sacchetti has more 
than all his prohfic tribe, and it is impossible for a 
foreigner to discern or to appreciate the merits of 
such a writer. The lower classes in Florence retain 
to this day much of their antique picturesque phrase- 
ology,! and Alfieri tells us that " it was his great 
dehght to stand in some unnoticed corner, and hsten 
to the conversation of the mob in the market-place." 

* This has been loudly censured by many of their scholars opposed to 
the literary supremacy of the Della-Cruscan Academy. See, in particu- 
lar, the acute treatise of Cesarotti, " Saggio sulla Filosojia delle Lingue,^^ 
Parte IV. 

t '* The pure language of Boccaccio, and of other ancient writers, is 
preserved at this day much more among the lower classes of Florentine 
mechanics and of the neighbouring peasants than among the more pol- 
ished Tuscan society, whose original dialect has suffered great mutations 
in their intercourse with foreigners." — Pignotti, " Storia delta Toscana,''^ 
torn, ii., p. 167. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 427 

With the exception of Orlando, Palci has shown 
no great skill in dehneation of character. Charle- 
magne and Ganelon are the prominent personages. 
The latter is a parody on traitors ; ho is a traitor to 
common sense. Charlemagne is a superannuated 
dupe, with just credulity sufficient to dovetail into 
all the cunning contrivances of Gan. The women 
have neither refinement nor virtue. The knights 
have none of the softer graces of chivalry; they bul- 
ly and swagger like the rude heroes of Homer, and 
are exclusively occupied with the merciless extermi- 
nation of infidels. We meet with none of the im- 
agery, the rich sylvan scenery, so lavishly diffused 
through the epics of Ariosto and Boiardo. The 
machinery bears none of the airy touches of an Ara- 
bian pencil, but is made out of the cold excrescences 
of Northern superstition, dwarfs, giants, and necro- 
mancers. Before quitting Pulci, we must point out 
a passage (canto xxv., st. 229, 230), in which a 
devil announces to Rinaldo the existence of another 
continent beyond the ocean, inhabited by mortals 
like himself The theory of gravitation is also 
plainly intimated. As the poem was written before 
the voyages of Columbus, and before the physical 
discoveries of Gahleo and Copernicus, the predic- 
tions are extremely curious.* The fiend, alluding 

* Dante, two centuries before, had also expressed the same belief in 
an undiscovered quarter of the globe : 

" De' vostri sensi, ch'e del rimanente, 
Non vogliate negar I'esperienza, 
Diretro al sol, del mondo senza gente.'" 

Inferno, can. xxvi., v. 115. 



428 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

to the vulgar superstitions entertained of the Pillars 
of Hercules, thus addresses his companion : 

" Know that this theory is false ; his bark 
The daring mariner shall urge far o'er 
The Western wave, a smooth and level plain, 
Albeit the earth is fashion'd like a wheel. 
Man was in ancient days of grosser mould, 
And Hercules might blush to learn how far 
Beyond the limits he had vainly set, 
The dullest seaboat soon shall wing her way. 
Men shall descry another hemisphere, 
Since to one common centre all things tend ; 
So earth, by curious mystery divine 
Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres. 
At our antipodes are cities, states, 
And thronged empires, ne'er divined of yore. 
But see, the sun speeds on his western path 
To glad the nations with expected light." 

The dialogues of Pulci's devils respecting free-will 
and necessity, their former glorious, and their pres- 
ent fallen condition, have suggested many hints for 
our greater Milton to improve upon. The juggling 
frolics of these fiends at the royal banquet in Sara- 
gossa may have been the original of the comical mar- 
vels played off through the intervention of similar 
agents by Dr. Faust. 

Notwithstanding the good faith and poetical ele- 
vation of its concluding cantos, the Morgante, ac- 
cording to our apprehension, is anything but a se- 
rious romance. Not that it shows a disposition to 
satire, above all, to the religious satire often imputed 
to it; but there is a light banter, a vein of fun run- 
ning through the greater portion of it, which is quite 
the opposite of the lofty spirit of chivalry. Roman- 
tic fiction, among our Norman ancestors, grew so 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 429 

directly out of the feudal relations and adventurous 
spirit of the age, that it was treated with all the 
gravity of historical record. When reproduced in 
the polite and artificial societies of Italy, the same 
fictions wore an air of ludicrous extravagance which 
would no longer admit of their being repeated seri- 
ously. Recommended, however, by a proper sea- 
soning of irony, they might still amuse as ingenious 
tales of wonder. This may be kept in view in fol- 
lowing out the ramifications of Italian narrative po- 
etry ; for they will all be found, in a greater or less 
degree, tinctured with the same spirit of ridicule."^ 
The circle for whom Pulci composed his epic was 
peculiarly distinguished by that fondness for good- 
humoured raillery, which may be considered a na- 
tional trait with his countrymen. 

It seems to have been the delight of Lorenzo de' 
Medici, as it was afterward, in a more remarkable 

* A distinction may be pointed out between the Norman and the Ital- 
ian epics of chivalry. The former, composed in the rude ages of feudal 
heroism, are entitled to much credit as pictures of the manners of that 
period ; while the latter, written in an age of refinement, have been car- 
ried by their poets into such beautiful extravagances of fiction as are 
perfectly incompatible with a state of society at any period. Let any 
one compare the feats of romantic valour recorded by Froissart, the tur- 
bulent, predatory habits of the barons and ecclesiastics under the early 
Norman dynasty, as reported by Turner in his late '' History of England," 
with these old romances, and he will find enough to justify our remark. 
St. Pelaye, after a diligent study of the ancient epics, speaks of them as 
exhibiting a picture of society closely resembling that set forth in the 
chronicles of the period. Turner, after as diligent an examination of 
early historical documents, pronounces that the facts contained in them 
perfectly accord with the general portraiture of manners depicted in the 
romances. — Mem. de VAcad. des Inscriptions, tom. xx., Art. sur V Ancient 
Chevalerie. Turner'' s " History of England from the Norman Conquest,^* 
&c., vol. i., ch. vi. 



430 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

degree, of his son Leo Tenth, to abandon himself 
to the most unreserved social freedoms with the 
friends whom he collected around his table. The 
satirical epigrams which passed there in perfect 
good humour between his guests, show, at least, full 
as much merriment as manners. Machiavelli con- 
cludes his history of Florence with an elaborate por- 
trait of Lorenzo, in which he says that " he took 
greater delight in frivolous pleasures, and in the so- 
ciety of jesters and satirists, than became so great a 
man." The historian might have been less austere 
in his commentary upon Lorenzo's taste, since he 
was not particularly fastidious in the selection of his 
own amusements.* 

At the close of the fifteenth century Italy was di- 
vided into a number of small but independent states, 
whose petty sovereigns vied with each other, not 
merely in the poor parade of royal pageantry, but in 
the liberal endowment of scientific institutions, and 

* A letter written by Machiavelli, long unknown, and printed for the 
first time at Milan, 1810, gives a curious picture of his daily occupations 
when living in retirement, on his little patrimony, at a distance from 
Florence. Among other particulars, he mentions that it was his custom 
after dinner to repair to the tavern, where he passed his afternoon at 
cards with the company whom he ordinarily found there, consisting of 
the host, a miller, a butcher, and a lime-maker. Another part of the 
epistle exhibits a more pleasing view of the pursuits of the ex-secretary. 
"In the evening I return to my house and retire to my study. I then 
take off the rustic garments which I had worn during the day, and, hav- 
ing dressed myself in the apparel which I used to wear at court and in 
town, I mingle in the society of the great men of antiquity. I draw from 
them the nourishment which alone is suited to me, and during the four 
hours passed in this intercourse i forget all my misfortunes, and fear 
neither poverty nor death. In this manner I have composed a little 
work upon government." This little work was The Prince. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 431 

the patronage of learned men. Almost every Italian 
scholar was attached to some one or other of these 
courtly circles, and a generous, enlightened emula- 
tion sprung up among the states of Italy, such as 
had never before existed in any other age or coun- 
try. Among the Republics of ancient Greece the 
rivalship was jpolitical. Their literature, from the 
time of Solon, was almost exclusively Athenian. 
An interesting picture of the cultivated manners and 
intellectual pleasures of these Httle courts may be 
gathered from the Cortigiano of Castiglione, which 
contains in the introduction a particular account of 
the pursuits and pastimes at the court of his sover- 
eign, the Duke of Urbino. 

None of these Italian states make so shining a 
figure in literary history as the insignificant duchy 
of Ferrara. The foul crimes which defile the do- 
mestic annals of the family of Este have been for- 
gotten in the munificent patronage extended by 
them to letters. The librarians of the Biblioteca 
Estense, Muratori and Tiraboschi, have celebrated 
the virtues of their native princes with the encomi- 
astic pen of loyalty ; while Ariosto and Tasso, whose 
misfortunes furnish but an indifferent commentary 
upon these eulogiums, offering to them the grateful 
incense of poetic adulation, have extended their 
names still wider by inscribing them upon their im- 
mortal epics. Their patronage had the good for- 
tune, not always attending patronage, of developing 
genius. Those models of the pastoral drama, the 
Aminta of Tasso, and the Pastor Fido of Guarini, 



432 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

whose luxury of expression, notwithstanding the die- 
turn of Dr. Johnson,* it has been found as difficult to 
imitate in their own tongue as it is impossible to 
translate into any other; the comedies and Hora- 
tian satires of Ariosto ; the Secchia Rapita of Tas- 
soni, the acknowledged model of the mock-heroic 
poems of Pope and Boileau ; and, finally, the three 
great epics of Italy, the Orlando Innamorato, the 
Furioso, and the Gerusalemme Liberata, were all 
produced in the brief compass of a century, within 
the limited dominions of the House of Este. Dante 
had reproached Ferrara, in the thirteenth century, 
with never having been illustrated by the name of 
a poet. 

Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, the author of the 
Orlando Innamorato, the first-born of these epics^ 
was a subject of Hercules First, Duke of Ferrara, 
and by him appointed governor of Reggio. His 
military conduct in that office, and his learned trans- 
lations from the ancient classics, show him to have 
been equally accomplished as a soldier and as a 
scholar. In the intervals of war, to which his active 
life was devoted, he amused himself with the com- 
position of his long poem. He had spun this out 
into the sixty-seventh canto without showing any 
disposition to bring it to a conclusion, when his lit- 
erary labours were suddenly interrupted, as he in- 
forms us in his parting stanza, by the invasion of 

* " Dione is a counterpart to Aminta and Pastor Fido, and other trifles 
of the same kind, easily imitated and unworthy of imitation."— jLi/<2 of 
Gay. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 433 

the French into Italy in 1794, and in the same year 
the author died. The Orlando Innamorato, as it 
advanced, had been read by its author to his friends ; 
but no portion of it was printed till after his death, 
and its extraordinary merits were not then widely 
estimated, in consequence of its antiquated phrase- 
ology and Lombard provincialisms. A Rifacimento 
some time after appeared, by one Domenichi, who 
spoiled many of the beauties, without improving the 
style of his original. Finally, Berni, in little more 
than thirty years after the death of Boiardo, new- 
moulded the whole poem,^ with so much dexterity 
as to retain the substance of every verse in the ori- 
ginal, and yet to clothe them in the seductive graces 
of his own classical idiom. Berni's version is the 
only one now read in Italy, and the original poem 
of Boiardo is so rare in that country, that it was 
found impossible to procure, for the library of Har- 
vard University, any copy of the Innamorato more 
ancient than the reformed one by Domenichi. 

The history of letters affords no stronger exam- 
ple of the power of style than the different fate of 
these two productions of Berni and Boiardo. We 
doubt whether the experiment would have been at- 
tended with the same result among a people by 
whom the nicer beauties of expression are less cul- 

* Sismondi is mistaken in saying that Berni remodelled the Innamorato 
sixty years after the original. He survived Boiardo only forty-two years, 
and he had half completed his Rifacimento at least ten years before his 
own death, as is evident from his beautiful invocation to Verona and the 
Po (canto XXX.), on whose banks he was then writing it, and where he 
was living, 1526, in the capacity of secretary to the Bishop of Verona. 

In 



434 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tivated, as with the Enghsh, for example. If we 
may judge from the few specimens which we have 
seen extracted from the Itahan original, Chaucer 
exhibits a more obsolete and exotic phraseology 
than Boiardo. Yet the partial attempt of Dryden 
to invest the father of English poetry with a mod- 
ernized costume has had little success, and the httle 
epic of Falamon and Arcite ( The Knighfs Tale) 
is much more highly rehshed in the rude but mus- 
cular diction of Chaucer than in the polished ver- 
sion of his imitator. 

Whatever may be the estimation of the style, the 
glory of the original delineation of character and in- 
cident is to be given exclusively to Boiardo. He 
was the first of the epic poets who founded a ro- 
mance upon the love of Orlando ; and a large por- 
tion of the poem is taken up with the adventures of 
this hero and his doughty Paladius, assembled in a 
remote province of China for the defence of his mis- 
tress, the beautiful Angelica : 

"When Agrican, with all his northern powers, 
Besieged Albracca, as romances tell, 
The city of Gallaphrone, from thence to win 
The fairest of her sex, Angelica 
His daughter, sought by many prowess knights 
Both Paynim, and the peers of Charlemagne." 

Paradise Regained. 

With the exception of the midnight combat between 
Agrican and Orlando, in which the conversion of 
the dying Tartar reminds one of the similar, but 
more affecting death of Clorinda, in the Jerusalem 
Delivered, there is very little moral interest attach- 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 435 

ed to these combats of Boiardo, which are mere 
gladiatorial exhibitions of hard fighting, and sharp, 
jealous wranghng. The fairy gardens of Falerina 
and Morgana, upon which the poet enters in the 
second book, are much better adapted to the display 
of his wild and exuberant imagination. No Italian 
writer, not even Ariosto, is comparable to Boiardo 
for exhibitions of fancy. Enchantment follows en- 
chantment, and the reader, bewildered with the 
number and rapidity of the transitions, looks in vain 
for some clew, even the slender thread of allegory 
which is held out by the poet, to guide him through 
the unmeaning marvellous of Arabian fiction. Ari- 
osto has tempered his imagination with more discre- 
tion. Both of these great romantic poets have 
wrought upon the same characters, and afford, in 
this respect, a means of accurate comparison. With- 
out going into details, we may observe, in general, 
that Boiardo has more strength than grace ; Ariosto, 
the reverse. Boiardo's portraits are painted, or may 
be rather said to be sculptured, with a clear, coarse 
hand, out of some rude material. Ariosto's are 
sketched with the volatile graces, nice shades, and 
variable drapery of the most delicate Itahan pencil. 
In female portraiture, of course, Ariosto is far supe- 
rior to his predecessor. The glaring coquetry of 
Boiardo's Angehca is refined by the hand of his rival 
into something hke the coquetry of high life, and 
the ferocious tigress beauties of the original Marfisa 
are softened into those of a more polished and court- 
ly amazon. The Innamorato contains no examples 



436 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of the pure, deep feeling, which gives a soul to the 
females of the Furioso, and we look in vain for the 
frolic and airy scenes which enchant us so frequent- 
ly in the latter poem.* We may remark, in con- 
clusion, that the rapid and unintermitting succession 
of incidents in the Tnnamorato prevents the poet 
from indulging in those collateral beauties of senti- 
ment and imagery which are prodigally diffused over 
the romance of Ariosto, and which give to it an ex- 
quisite finish. 

Berni's Rifacimento of the Orlando Innamorato, 
as we have already observed, first made it popular 
with the Italians, by a magical varnish of versifica- 
tion, which gave greater lustre to the beauties of his 
original, and glossed over its defects. It has, how- 
ever, the higher merit of exhibiting a great variety 
of original reflections, sometimes in the form of di- 
gressions, but more frequently as introductions to 
the cantos. These are enhvened by the shrewd 
wit and elaborate artlessness of expression, that form 
the peculiar attraction of Berni's poetry. In one of 
the prefatory stanzas to the fifty-first canto, the read- 
er may recognise a curious coincidence with a well- 
known passage in Shakspeare ; the more so, as Ber- 
ni, we beheve, was never turned into English before 
the present partial attempt of Mr. Rose : 

" Who steals a bugle-horn, a ring, a steed, 

Or such like worthless thing, has sofae discretion ; 
'Tis petty larceny ; not such his deed 
Who robs us of our fame, our best possession. 

* The chase of the Fairy Morgana, and the malicious dance of the 
Loves round Rinaldo (1. ii., c. viii., xv.), may, however, be considered 
good exceptions to this remark. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. , 437 

And he who takes our labour's worthiest meed 

May well be deem'd a felon by profession ; 
Who so much more our hate and scourge deserves, 
As from the rule of right he wider swerves." 

In another of these episodes the poet has introdu- 
ced a portrait of himself. The whole passage is too 
long for insertion here ; but, as Mr. Rose has also 
translated it, we will borrow a few stanzas from his 
skilful version : 

" His mood was choleric, and his tongue was vicious, 
But he was praised for singleness of heart ; 

Not taxed as avaricious or ambitious, 
Affectionate and frank, and void of art ; 

A lover of his friends, and unsuspicious ; 
But where he hated knew no middle part ; 

And men his malice by his love might rate : 

But then he was more prone to love than hate. 

" To paint his person, this was thin and dry : 
Well sorting it, his legs were spare and lean ; 

Broad was his visage, and his nose was high, 
While narrow was the space that was between 

His eyebrows sharp ; and blue his hollow eye. 
Which for his bushy beard had not been seen 

But that the master kept this thicket clear'd, 

At mortal war with mustache and with beard. 

" No one did ever servitude detest 

Like him, though servitude was still his dole ; 

Since fortune or the devil did their best 
To keep him evermore beneath control. 

While, whatsoever was his patron's hest, 
To execute it went against his soul ; 

His service would he freely yield, unask'd, 

But lost all heart and hope if he were task'd. 

*' Nor music, hunting match, nor mirthful measure. 
Nor play, nor other pastime, moved him aught ; 

And if 'twas true that horses gave him pleasure. 
The simple sight of them was all he sought. 

Too poor to purchase ; and his only treasure 
His naked bed ; his pastime to do naught 



438 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

But tumble there, and stretch his weary length, 
And so recruit his spirits and his strength." 

Rose's Innamorato, p. 48. 

The passage goes on to represent the dreamy and 
luxurious pleasures of this indolent pastime, with 
such an Epicurean minuteness of detail as puts the 
sincerity of the poet beyond a doubt. His smaller 
pieces, Capitoli, as they are termed, contain many 
incidental allusions, which betray the same lazy pro- 
pensity. 

The early part of Berni's life was passed in Rome, 
where he obtained a situation under the ecclesias- 
tical government. He was afterward established in 
a canonry at Florence, where he led an easy, effem- 
inate life, much caressed for his social talents by the 
Duke Alessandro de' Medici. His end was more 
tragical than was to have been anticipated from so 
quiet and unambitious a temper. He is said to have 
been secretly assassinated, 1536, by the order of Al- 
exander, for refusing to administer poison to the 
duke's enemy, the Cardinal Hyppolito de' Medici. 
The story is told in many contradictory ways by 
different Italian writers, some of whom disbelieve it 
altogether. The imputation, however, is an evi- 
dence of the profligate character of that court, and, 
if true, is only one out of many examples of perfid- 
ious assassination, which, in that age, dishonoured 
some of the most polished societies in Italy. 

Berni has had the distinction of conferring his 
name on a pecuhar species of Italian composi- 
tion.* The epithet ''Bernescd' is not derived, how- 

* He cannot be properly considered its inventor, however. He lived 



ITALIAN 1VARRATIVE POETRY. 439 

ever, as has been incorrectly stated by some foreign 
scholars,* from his reformed version of the " Orlan- 
do," but from his smaller pieces, his Capitoli more 
especially. It is difficult to convey a correct and 
adequate notion of this kind of satirical trifling, since 
its chief excellence results from idiomatic felicities 
of expression, that refuse to be transplanted into a 
foreign tongue, and there is no imitation of it, that 
we recollect, in our own language. It is a misap- 
plication of the term Bernesque to apply it, as has 
been sometimes done, to the ironical style supposed 
to have been introduced by Lord Byron in his Bep- 
po and Don Juan. The clear, unequivocal vein of 
irony which plays through the sportive saUies of the 
Italian has no resemblance to the subdued but caus- 
tic sneer of the Englishman ; nor does it, in our 
opinion, resemble in the least Peter Pindar's bur- 
lesque satire, to which an excellent critic in Italian 
poetry has compared it.f Pindar is much too unre- 
fined in versification and in diction to justify the 
parallel. Italian poetry always preserves the purity 
of its expression, however coarse or indecent may 
be the topic on which it is employed. The subjects 
of many of these poems are of the most whimsical 
and trivial nature. We find some in Lode delta 
Peste, del Dehito, &c. Several in commendation of 

in time to give the last polish to a species of familiar poetry, which had 
been long undergoing the process of refinement from the hands of his 
countrymen. 

* Vide Annotazioni alia Vita di Berni, dal conte Mazzuchelli. Clas. 
Ital., p. xxxiv. 

t Roscoe's " Life of Loren. de' Medici,'^ vol. i., p. 392, Note. 



440 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the delicacies of the table, of " jelhes," " eels," or any 
other dainty which pleased his epicurean palate. 
These Capitoli, like most of the compositions of this 
polished versifier, furnish a perfect example of the 
triumph of style. The sentiments, sometimes indel- 
icate, and often puerile, may be considered, like the 
worthless insects occasionally found in amber, in- 
debted for their preservation to the beautiful sub- 
stance in which they are imbedded. 

It is a curious fact, that, notwithstanding the ap- 
parent facihty and fluent graces of Berni's style, it 
was wrought with infinite care. Some of his verses 
have been corrected twenty and thirty times. Many 
of his countrymen have imitated it, mistaking its fa- 
miliarity of manner for facility of execution. 

This fastidious revision has been common with 
the most eminent Italian poets. Petrarca devoted 
months to the perfecting of one of his exquisite son- 
nets.* Ariosto, as his son Virginius records of him, 
" was never satisfied with his verses, but was con- 
tinually correcting and recorrecting them;" almost 

* The following is a literal translation of a succession of memoran- 
dums in Latin at the head of one of his sonnets : " I began this by the 
impulse of the Lord {Domino jubcnte), tenth September, at the dawn of 
day, after my morning prayers." 

" I must make these two verses over again, singing them, and I must 
transpose them. Three o'clock A.M., 19th October." 

" I like this. (Hoc placet) 30th October." 

" No, this does not please me. 20th December, in the evening." 

" February 18th, towards noon. This is now well ; however, look at 
it again." 

It was generally on Friday that he occupied himself with the painful 
labour of correction, and this was also set apart by him as a day of fast 
and penitence. — " Essays,'''' cit. sup. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 441 

every stanza in the last edition of his poem pubUsh- 
ed in his hfetime is akered from the original, and 
one verse is pointed out (canto xviii., st. 142) w^hose 
variations filled many pages. Tasso's manuscripts, 
preserved in the library at Modena, have been so 
often retouched by him that they are hardly intelli- 
gible ; and Alfieri was in the habit, not only of cor- 
recting verses, but of remoulding whole tragedies, 
several of which, he tells us in his Memoirs, were 
thus transcribed by him no less than three times. 
It is remarkable, that in a country where the ima- 
gination has been most active, the labour of the file 
should have been most diligently exerted on poetical 
compositions. Such examples of the pains taken by 
men of real genius might furnish a wholesome hint 
to some of the rapid, dashing writers of our own day. 
"Avec quelque talent qu'on puisse etre ne," says 
Rousseau, in his Confessions, "Tart d'ecrire ne se 
prend pas tout d'un coup." 

We have violated the chronological series of the 
Itahan epopee, in our notice of Berni, in order to 
connect his poem with the model on which it was 
cast. We will quit him with the remark, that for 
his fame he seems to have been as much indebted to 
good fortune as to desert. His countrymen have 
affixed his name to an illustrious poem of which he 
was not the author, and to a popular species of com- 
position of which he was not the inventor. 

In little more than twenty years after the death 
of Boiardo, Ariosto gave to the world his first edi- 
tion of the Orlando Furioso. The celebrity of the 

Kkk 



442 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Innamorato made Ariosto prefer building upon this 
sure foundation to casting a new one of his own, and 
as his predecessor had fortunately left all the dra- 
matis personae of his unfinished epic alive upon the 
stage, he had only to continue their histories to the 
end of the drama. " As the former of these two 
poems has no termination, and the latter no regular 
beginning, they may both be considered as forming 
one complete epic."* The latter half was, however, 
destined not only to supply the deficiencies, but to 
eclipse the glories of the former. . 

Louis Ariosto was born of a respectable family at 
Reggio, 1474. After serving a reluctant apprentice- 
ship of five years in the profession of the law, his 
father allowed him to pursue other studies better 
adapted to his taste and poetical genius. The ele- 
gance of his lyrical compositions in Latin and Ital- 
ian recommended him to the patronage of the Car- 
dinal Hyppolito d'Este, and of his brother Alphonso, 
who in 1505 succeeded to the ducal throne of Fer- 
rara. Ariosto's abilities were found, however, not to 
be confined to poetry, and, among other offices of 
trust, he was employed by the duke in two impor- 
tant diplomatic negotiations with the court of Rome. 
But the Muses still obtained his principal homage, 
and all his secret leisure was applied to the perfect- 
ing of the great poem, which was to commemorate 
at once his own gratitude and the glories of the 
house of Este. After fourteen years assiduous la- 
bour, he presented to the Cardinal Hyppolito the 

* Tasso, Discorsi Poetici, p. 29. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 443 

first copy of his Orlando Furioso. The well-known 
reply of the prelate, '^ Messer Lodovico, dove mai avete 
trovate tante fanfaluche /" " Master Louis, where 
have you picked up so many trifles ?" will be remem- 
bered in Italy as long as the poem itself.* 

Ariosto, speaking of his early study of jurispru- 
dence in one of his Satires,t says that he passed five 
years in quelle ciancie ; a word which signifies much 
the same with the Q'^iih.^t fanfaluche or coglionerie, 
whichever it might have been, imputed to the cardi- 
nal. Ariosto was a poet ; the cardinal was a math- 
ematician; and each had the very common failing 
of undervaluing a profession different from his own. 
The courtly librarian of the Bihlioteca Estense en- 
deavours to explain away this and the subsequent 
conduct of Ariosto's patron ; J but the poet's Satires, 
in which he alludes to the behaviour of the cardinal 
with the fine raillery, and to his own situation with 
the philosophic independence of Horace, furnish 
abundant evidence of the cold, ungenerous deport- 
ment of Hyppolito.§ 

* An interrogation, which might remind an Englishman of that put by 
the great Duke of Cumberland to Gibbon : " What, Mr. Gibbon, scribble, 
scribble, scribble stilll" 

t A. M. Pietro Bembo Cardinale. 

+ Storia delta Lett. Ital, tom. vii., P. 1., p. 42, 43. 

^ In a satire addressed to Alessandro Ariosto, he speaks openly of the 
unprofitableness of his poetic labours : 

'* Thanks to the Muses who reward 
So well the service of their bard, 
He almost may be said to lack 
A decent coat to clothe his back." 

And soon after, in the same epistle, he adverts with undisguised in- 
dignation to the oppressive patronage of Hyppolito : 



444 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Notwithstanding the alienation of the cardinal, 
the poet still continued in favour with Alphonso. 
The patronage bestowed upon him, however, seems 
to have been of a very selfish and sordid complex- 
ion. He was employed by the duke in offices most 
vexatious to one of his studious disposition, and he 
passed three years in reducing to tranquillity a bar- 
barous, rebellious province of the duchy. His ad- 
venture there with a troop of banditti, who aban- 
doned a meditated attack upon him when they learn- 
ed that he was the author of the Orlando Furioso, 
is a curious instance of homage to literary talent, 
w^hich may serve as di ;pendant to the similar anec- 
dote recorded of Tasso.* 

The latter portion of his life was passed on his 

" If the poor stipend I receive 
Has led his highness to believe 
He has a right to task my toil 
Like any serf's upon his soil, 
T' enthral me with a servile chain 
That grinds my soul, his hopes are vain. 
Sooner than be such household slave, 
The sternest poverty I'll brave, 
And from his pride and presents free, 
Resume my long-lost liberty." 

* Ginguene, whose facts are never to be suspected, whatever credit 
may be attached to his opinions, has related both these adventures with- 
out any qualification {Histoire Litteraire d'ltalie, torn, iv., p. 359, et V. 
291). This learned Frenchman professes to have compiled his history 
under the desire of vindicating Italian literature from the disparaging 
opinions entertained of it among his countrymen. This has led him to 
swell the trumpet of panegyric somewhat too stoutly — indeed, much above 
the modest tone of the Italian savant, who, upon his premature death, 
was appointed to continue the work. Ginguene died before he had com- 
pleted the materials for his ninth volume, and the hiatus supplied by Pro- 
fessor Salfi carries down the literary narrative only to the conclusion of 
the sixteenth century. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 445 

own estate in comparative retirement. He refused 
all public employment, and, with the exception of 
his satires, and a few comedies which he prepared 
for the theatre committed to his superintendence by 
Alphonso, he produced no new work. His hours 
were diligently occupied with the emendation and 
extension of his great poem; and in 1532, soon af- 
ter the republication of it in forty-six cantos, as it 
now stands, he died of a disease induced by severe 
and sedentary application. 

Ariosto is represented to have possessed a cheer- 
ful disposition, temperate habits, and their usual con- 
comitant, a good constitution. Barotti has quoted, 
in his memoirs of the poet, some particulars respect- 
ing him, found among the papers of Vjrginius, his 
natural son. He is there said not to have been a 
great reader; Horace and Catullus were the authors 
in whom he took most delight. His intense medi- 
tation upon the subject of his compositions frequent- 
ly betrayed him into fits of abstraction, one of which 
is recorded. Intending, on a fine morning, to take 
his usual walk, he set out from Carpi, where he re- 
sided, and reached Ferrara late in the afternoon, in 
his slippers and robe de chambre, uninterrupted by 
any one. His patrimony, though small, was equal to 
his necessities. An inscription which he placed over 
his door is indicative of that moderation and love of 
independence which distinguished his character : 

" Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non 
Sordida, parta meo sed tamen sere domus." 

It does not appear probable that he was ever mar- 



446 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ried. He frequently alludes in his poems to some 
object of his affections, but without naming her. 
His bronze inkstand, still preserved in the library at 
Ferrara, is surmounted by a relievo of a Cupid with 
his finger upon his lip, emblematic of a discreet si- 
lence not very common in these matters with his 
countrymen. He is said to have intended his mis- 
tress by the beautiful portrait of Ginevra (c. iv., v.), 
as Tasso afterward shadowed out Leonora in the 
affecting episode of Sophronia. This was giving 
them, according to Ariosto's own allusion, a glorious 
niche in the temple of immortality.^ 

There still existed a general affectation among 
the Itahan scholars of writing in the Latin language 
when Ariosto determined to compose an epic poem. 
The most accomplished proficients in that ancient 
tongue flourished about this period, and Politian, 
Pontano, Vida, Sannazarius, Sadolet, Bembo, had 
revived, both in prose and poetry, the purity, precis- 
ion, and classic elegance of the Augustan age. Po- 
litian and Lorenzo de Medici were the only writers 
of the preceding century who had displayed the 
fecundity and poetical graces of their vernacular 
tongue, and their productions had been too few and 
of too trifling a nature to establish a permanent pre- 
cedent. Bembo, who wrote his elaborate history 
first in Latin, and who carried the complicated in- 
versions, in fact, the idiom of that language, into his 
Italian compositions, would have persuaded Ariosto 
to write his poem in the same tongue ; but he wise- 

* 0. F., can. xxxv., st. 15, 16. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 447 

ly replied that " he would rather be first among 
Tuscan writers than second among the Latin," and, 
following the impulse of his own more discrimina- 
ting taste, he gave, in the Orlando Furioso, such an 
exhibition of the fine tones and flexible movements 
of his native language as settled the question of its 
precedence forever with his countrymen. 

Ariosto at first intended to adopt the terza rima 
of Dante ; indeed, the introductory verses of his 
poem in this measure are still preserved. He soon 
abandoned it, however, for the ottava rima, which is 
much better adapted to the light, rambUng, pictu- 
resque narrative of the romantic epic* Every stan- 
za furnishes a little picture in itself, and the perpet- 
ual recurrence of the same rhyme produces not only 
a most agreeable melody to the ear, but is very fa- 
vourable to a full and more powerful development 
of the poet's sentiments. Instances of the truth of 
this remark must be familiar to every reader of Ari- 
osto. It has been apphed by Warton, with equal 
justice, to Spenser, whom the similar repetition of 
identical cadences often leads to a copious and beau- 
tiful expansion of imagery.f Spenser's stanza dif- 

* The Italians, since the failure of Trissino, have very generally adopt- 
ed this measure for their epic poetry, v^^hile the terza rima is used for 
didactic and satirical composition. The graver subjects which have en- 
gaged the attention of some of their poets during the last century have 
made blank verse {verso sciolto) more fashionable among them. Cesar- 
otti's Ossian, one of the earliest, may be cited as one of the most suc- 
cessful examples of it. No nation is so skilful in a nice adaptation of 
style to the subject, and imitative harmony has been carried by them to a 
perfection which it can never hope to attain in any other living language ; 
for what other language is made so directly out of the elements of music 1 

t The following stanza from the " Faerie Queene," describing the 



448 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

fers materially from the Italian ottava rima, in hav- 
ing one more rhyme, and in the elongated Alexan- 
drine with which it is concluded. This gave to his 
verses " the long, majestic march," well suited to the 
sober sublimity of his genius; but the additional 
rhyme much increased its metrical difficulties, al- 
ready, from the comparative infrequency of asso- 
nances in our language, far superior to those of the 
Italian. This has few compound sounds, but, roll- 
ing wholly upon the five open vowels, a, e, i, o, u, 
affords a prodigious number of corresponding termi- 
nations. Hence their fRciVity of improvisation. Vol- 
taire observes that, in the Jerusalem Delivered, not 
more than seven words terminate in u, and express- 
es his astonishment that we do not find a greater 
monotony in the constant recurrence of only four 
rhymes.* The reason may be, that, in Italian po- 
etry, the rhyme falls both upon the penultima and 
the final syllable of each verse ; and as these two 
syllables in the same word turn upon different vow- 
els, a greater variety is given to the melody. This 

habitation of Morpheus " drowned deep in drowsie fit," may serre as an 
exemplification of our meaning : 

"And more to lull him in his slumber soft, 

A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, 
And ever drizling raine upon the loft, 

Mixt with a murmuring winde much like the sowne 
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne ; 
No other noyes nor people's troublous cryes 
As still are wont to annoy the walled towne 
Might there be heard ; but careless quiet lyes, 
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes." 

* Lettre a Dcodati di Tovazzi. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 449 

double rhyming termination, moreover, gives an in- 
expressible lightness and delicacy to Italian poetry, 
very different from the broad comic which similar 
compomid rhymes, no doubt from the infrequency 
of their application to serious subjects, communicate 
to the English. 

Ariosto is commonly most admired for the inex- 
haustible fertility of his fancy ; yet a large propor- 
tion of his fictions are borrowed, copied, or contin- 
ued from those of preceding poets. The elegant 
allegories of ancient superstition, as they were col- 
lected or invented by Homer and Ovid, the wild 
adventures of the Norman romances, the licentious 
merriment of the gossiping fabliaux, and the en- 
chantments of Eastern fable, have all been employed 
in the fabric of Ariosto's epic. But, although this 
diminishes his claims to an inventive fancy, yet, on 
the whole, it exalts his character as a poet ; for 
these same fictions under the hands of preceding ro- 
mancers, even of Boiardo, were cold and uninterest- 
ing, or, at best, raised in the mind of the reader only 
a stupid admiration, like that occasioned by the gro- 
tesque and unmeaning w^onders of a fairy tale. But 
Ariosto inspired them with a deep and living inter- 
est; he adorned them with the graces of sentiment 
and poetic imagery, and enlivened them by a vein 
of wit and shrew^d reflection. 

Ariosto's style is most highly esteemed by his 
countrymen. The clearness with which it express- 
es the most subtle and delicate beauties of sentiment 
may be compared to Alcina's 

L L L 



450 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

" Vel sottile e rado, 
Che non copria dinanzi ne di dietro, 
Piu che le rose o i gigli un chiaro vetro." — C. vii., s. 28.* 

We recollect no English poet whose manner in any 
degree resembles him. La Fontaine, the most ex- 
quisite versifier of his nation, when in his least fa- 
miliar mood, comes the nearest to him among the 
French. Spence remarks, that Spenser must have 
imagined Ariosto intended to write a serious roman- 
tic poem. The same opinion has been maintained 
by some of the Italian critics. Such, however, is 
not the impression we receive from it. Not to men- 
tion the broad farce with which the narrative is oc- 
casionally checkered, as the adventures of Giocon- 
do, the Enchanted Cup, &c., a sly, suppressed smile 
seems to lurk at the bottom even of his mo«t serious 
reflections ; sometimes, indeed, it plays openly upon 
the surface of his narrative, but more frequently, af- 
ter a beautiful and sober description, it breaks out, 
as it were, from behind a cloud, and lights up the 
whole with a gay and comic colouring. It would 
seem as if the natural acuteness of his poetic taste 
led him to discern in the magnanime mensogne of 
romantic fable abundant sources of the grand and 
beautiful, while the anti-chivalric character of his 
age, and, still more, the lively humour of his nation, 
led him to laugh at its extravagances. Hence the 
delicate intermixture of serious and comic, which 
gives a most agreeable variety, though somewhat of 
a curious perplexity to his style. 

* "A thin transparent veil, 

That all the beauties of her form discloses, 
As the clear crystal doth th' imprison'd roses." 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 451 

The Orlando Furioso went through six editions 
in the author's hfetime, two of which he supervised, 
and it passed through sixty in the course of the 
same century. Its poetic pretensions were of too 
exahed a character to allow it to be regarded as a 
mere fairy tale ; but it sorely puzzled the pedantic 
critics, both of that and of the succeeding age, to 
find out a justification for admitting it, with all its 
fantastic eccentricities, into the ranks of epic poetry. 
Multitudes have attacked and defended it upon this 
ground, and justice was not rendered to it until the 
more enlightened criticism of a later day set all 
things right by pointing out the distinction between 
the romantic and the classical.^ 

The cold and precise Boileau, who, like most of 
his countrymen, seems to have thought that beauty 
could wear only one form, and to have mistaken the 
beginnings of ancient art for its principles, quoted 
Horace to prove that no poet had the right to pro- 
duce such grotesque combinations of the tragical 
and comic as are found in Ariosto.f In the last 
century, Voltaire, a critic of a much wider range of 
observation, objects to a narrow, exclusive definition 
of an epic poem, on the just ground " that works 

* Hurd and T. Warton seem to have been among the earUest English 
writers who insisted upon the distinction between the Gothic and the 
classical. In their application of it to Spenser they display a philosophical 
criticism, guided not so much by ancient rules as by the peculiar genius 
of modern institutions. How superior this to the pedantic dogmas of the 
French school, or of such a caviller as Rymer, whom Dryden used to 
quote, and Pope extolled as " the best of English critics." 

t Dissertation Critique sur I'Aventure de Joconde. (Euvres de Boileau, 
tom. ii., p. 151. 



452 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of imagination depend so much on the different lan- 
guages and tastes of the different nations among 
whom they are produced, that precise definitions 
must have a tendency to exclude all beauties that 
are unknown or unfamiliar to us." — (Essay sur la 
Poesie Epique.) In less than forty pages farther we 
find, however, that "the Orlando Furioso, although 
popular with the mass of readers, is very inferior to 
the genuine epic poeni^ Voltaire's general reflec- 
tions were those of a philosopher; their particular 
application was that of a Frenchman. 

At a later period of his life he made a recantation 
of this precipitate opinion ; and he even went so far, 
in a parallel between the Furioso and the Odyssey, 
which he considered the model of the Italian poem, 
as to give a decided preference to the former. Ari- 
osto's imitations of the Odyssey, however, are not 
sufficient to authorize its being considered the model 
of his epic. Where these imitations do exist, they 
are not always the happiest efforts of his muse. The 
tedious and disgusting adventure of the Ogre, bor- 
rowed from that of the Cyclops Polypheme, is one 
of the greatest blemishes in the Furioso. Such 
"Jack the giant kiUing" horrors do not blend hap- 
pily with the airy and elegant fictions of the East. 
T\iQ fajniliarity of Ariosto's manner has an appa- 
rent resemblance to the simplicity of Homer's, which 
vanishes upon nearer inspection. The unaffected 
ease common to both resembles, in the Italian, the 
fashionable breeding that grows out of a perfect in- 
timacy with the forms of good society. In the 



I 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 453 

Greek it is rather an artlessness which resuks from 
never having been embarrassed by the conventional 
forms of society at all. Ariosto is perpetually ad- 
dressing his reader in the most familiar tone of con- 
versation ; Homer pursues his course with the un- 
deviating dignity of an epic poet. He tells all his 
stories, even the incredible, with an air of confiding 
truth. The Italian poet frequently qualifies his 
with some sly reference or apology, as " I will not 
vouch for it ; I repeat only what Turpin has told be- 
fore me :" 

"Mettendo lo Turpin, lo metto anch' io."* 

Ariosto's narratives are complicated and interrupt- 
ed in a most provoking manner. This has given of- 
fence to some of his warmest admirers, and to the 
severe taste of Alfieri in particular. Yet this fault, 
if indeed it be one, seems imputable to the art, not 
to the artist. He but followed preceding romancers, 
and conformed to the laws of his peculiar species 
of poetry. This involution of the narrative may be 
even thought to afford a relief and an agreeable con- 
trast, by its intermixture of grave and comic inci- 
dents ; at least, this is the apology set up for the 
same peculiarities of our own romantic drama. But, 
whatever exceptions may be taken by the acuteness 
or ignorance of critics at the conduct of the Orlando 

* Voltaire, with all his aversion to local prejudices, was too national 
to rehsh the naked simplicity of Homer. One of his witty reflections 
may show how he esteemed him. Speaking of Virgil's obligations to the 
Greek poet, " Some say," he observes, "that Homer made Virgil ; if so, 
this is, without doubt, the best work he ever made !" si cela est, c'est sans 
doute son plus bel ouvrage. 



454 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Furioso, the sagacity of its general plan is best vin- 
dicated by its wide and permanent popularity in its 
own country. None of their poets is so universally 
read by the Italians ; and the epithet divine, which 
the homage of an enhghtened few had before appro- 
priated to Dante, has been conferred by the voice 
of the whole nation upon the "Homer of Ferrara."* 
While those who copied the classical models of an- 
tiquity are forgotten, Ariosto, according to the beau- 
tiful eulogium of Tasso, " Partendo dalle vestigie 
degli Antichi Scrittori e dalle regole d'Aristotile, e 
letto e riletto da tutte I'eta, da tutti i sessi, noto a 
tutte le lingue, ringiovanisce sempre nella sua fama, 
e vola glorioso per le lingue de' mortah."t 

The name of Ariosto most naturally suggests this 
of Tasso, his illustrious but unfortunate rival in the 
same brilhant career of epic poetry ; for these two 
seem to hold the same relative rank, and to shed a 
lustre over the Italian poetry of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, like that reflected by Dante and Petrarch upon 
the fourteenth. The interest always attached to 
the misfortunes of genius has been heightened, in 
the case of Tasso, by the veil of mystery thrown 
over them ; and while his sorrows have been con- 
secrated by the " melodious tear" of the poet, the 
causes of them have furnished a most fruitful subject 
of speculation to the historian. 

He had been early devoted by his father to the 
study of jurisprudence, but, as with Ariosto, a love 

* The name originally given to him by his rival Tasso. 
t 'Discorsi Poetici, p. 33. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 455 

for the Muses seduced him from his severer duties. 
His father remonstrated ; but Tasso, at the age of 
seventeen, produced his Rinaldo, an epic in tw^elve 
cantos, and the admiration which it excited through- 
out Italy silenced all future opposition on the part 
of his parent. In 1565, Tasso, then tv^enty-one 
years of age, w^as received into the family of the 
Cardinal Luigi d'Este, to whom he had dedicated 
his precocious epic. The brilliant assemblage of 
rank and beauty at the little court of Ferrara exci- 
ted the visions of the youthful poet, while its richly 
endowed libraries and learned societies furnished a 
more soHd nourishment to his understanding. Un- 
der these influences, he was perpetually giving some 
new display of his poetic talent. His vein flowed 
freely in lyrical composition, and he is still regarded 
as one of the most perfect models in that saturated 
species of national poetry. In 1573 he produced 
his Aminta, which, in spite of its conceits and pas- 
toral extravagances, exhibited such a union of hter- 
ary finish and voluptuous sentiment as was to be 
found in no other Italian poem. It was translated 
into all the cultivated tongues in Europe, and was 
followed, during the lifetime of its author, by more 
than twenty imitations in Italy. No valuable work 
ever gave birth to a more worthless progeny. The 
Pastor Fido of Guarini is by far the best of these 
imitations ; but its elaborate luxury of wit is certain- 
ly not comparable to the simple, unsohcited beauties 
of the original. Tasso was, however, chiefly occu- 
pied with the composition of his great epic. He 



456 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

had written six cantos in a few months, but he was 
nearly ten years in completing it. He wrote with 
the rapidity of genius, but corrected with scrupulous 
deliberation. His Letters show the unwearied pains 
which he took to obtain the counsel of his friends, 
and his critical Discourses prove that no one could 
stand less in need of such counsel than himself. In 
1575 he completed his Jerusalem Delivered. Thus, 
before he had reached his thirty-second year, Tasso, 
as a lyric, epic, and dramatic writer, may be fairly 
said to have earned a threefold immortality in the 
highest walks of his art. His subsequent fate shows 
that literary glory rests upon no surer basis than the 
accidental successes of worldly ambition. 

The long and rigorous imprisonment of Tasso, 
by the sovereign over whose reign his writings had 
thrown such a lustre, has been as fruitful a source 
of speculation as the inexplicable exile of Ovid, and 
in like manner was, for a long time, imputed to an 
indiscreet and too aspiring passion in the poet. At 
length Tiraboschi announced, in an early edition of 
his history, that certain letters and original manu- 
scripts of Tasso, lately discovered in the library of 
Modena, had been put into the hands of the Abbe 
Serassi for the farther investigation of the mysterious 
transaction. The abbe's work appeared in 1785, 
and the facts disclosed by it clearly prove that the 
poet's passion for Leonora was not, as formerly ima- 
gined, the origin of his misfortunes.* These may 

* We are only acquainted with Serassi's " Life of Tasso" through the 
epitomes of Fabroni and Ginguene. The latter writer seems to us to lay 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 457 

be imputed to a variety of circumstances, none of 
which, however, would have deeply affected a per- 
son of a less irritable or better disciphned fancy. 
The calumnies and petty insults which he experi- 
enced from his rivals at the court of Ferrara, a clan- 
destine attempt to pubhsh his poem, but, more than 
all, certain conscientious scruples which he enter- 
tained as to the orthodoxy of his own creed, grad- 
ually wrought upon his feverish imagination to such 
a degree as in a manner to unsettle his reason. He 
fancied that his enemies were laying snares for his 
life, and that they had concerted a plan for accusing 
him of heresy before the Inquisition.* He privately 
absconded from Ferrara, returned to it again, but, 
soon after, disquieted by the same unhappy suspi- 
cions, left it precipitately a second time, without his 
manuscripts, without money, or any means of sub- 
sistence, and, after wandering from court to court, 
and experiencing, in the sorrowful language of Dante, 

" Come sa di sale 
Lo pane altrui, e com' e duro calle, 
Lo scendere e '1 salir per I'allrui scale, "t 

greater stress upon the poet's passion for Leonora than is warranted by 
his facts. Tasso dedicated, it is true, many an elegant sonnet to her 
charms, and distorted her name into as many ingenious puns as did Pe- 
trarch that of his mistress ; but when we consider that this sort of poet- 
ical tribute is very common with the Italians, that the lady was at least 
ten years older than the poet, and that, in the progress of this passion, he 
had four or five other well-attested subordinate flames, we shall have 
little reason to believe it produced a deep impression on his character. 

* His " Letters" betray the same timid jealousy. He is perpetually 
complaining that his correspondence is watched and intercepted, 
t " How salt the savour is of other's bread, 

How hard the passage to descend and climb 

By other's stairs." — Carey. 

M M M 



458 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

he threw himself once more upon the clemency of 
Alphonso ; but the duke, already alienated from him 
by his past extravagances, was incensed to such a 
degree by certain intemperate expressions of anger 
in wdiich the poet indulged on his arrival at the 
court, that he caused him to be confined in a mad- 
house {Hospital of St. Anne), 

Here, in the darkness and solitude of its meanest 
cell, disturbed only by the cries of the wretched in- 
mates of the mansion, he languished two years un- 
der the severest discipline of a refractory lunatic. 
Montaigne, in his visit to Italy, saw him in this hu- 
miUating situation, and his reflections upon it are 
even colder than those which usually fall from the 
phlegmatic philosopher.* The genius of Tasso, 
however, broke through the gloom of his dungeon, 
and several of the lyrical compositions of his impris- 
oned muse were as brilliant and beautiful as in the 
day of her prosperity. The distempered state of his 
imagination seems never to have clouded the vivid- 
ness of his perceptions on the subjects of his com- 
position, and during the remaining five years of his 
confinement at St. Anne, he wrote, in the form of 
dialogues, several highly-esteemed disquisitions on 
philosophical and moral theorems. During this lat- 

* " I felt even more spite than compassion to see him in so miserable 
a state, surviving, as it were, himself, unmindful either of himself or his 
works, which, without his concurrence, and before his eyes, were pub- 
lished to the world incorrect and deformed." — Essais de Montaigne^ torn, 
v., p. 114. Montaigne doubtless exaggerated the mental degradation of 
Tasso, since it favoured a position which, in the vain love of paradox 
that has often distinguished his countrymen, he was then endeavouring 
to establish, viz., the superiority of stupidity and ignorance over genius. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 459 

ter period Tasso had enjoyed a more commodious 
apartment, but the duke, probably dreading some 
Hterary reprisal from his injured prisoner, resisted 
all entreaties for his release. This was at length 
effected, through the intercession of the Prince of 
Mantua, in 1586. 

Tasso quitted Ferrara without an interview with 
his oppressor, and spent the residue of his days in 
the south of Italy. His countrymen, affected by his 
unmerited persecutions, received him wherever he 
passed with enthusiastic triumph. The nobility and 
the citizens of Florence w^aited upon him in a body, 
as if to make amends for the unjust strictures of 
their academy upon his poem, and a day was ap- 
pointed by the court of Rome for his solemn coro- 
nation in the capitol with the poetic wreath which 
had formerly encircled the brow of Petrarch. He 
died a few days before the intended ceremony. His 
body, attired in a Roman toga, was accompanied to 
the grave by nobles and ecclesiastics of the highest 
dignity, and his temples were decorated with the 
laurel, of which his perverse fortune had defrauded 
him when living. 

The unhappy fate of Tasso has affixed a deep 
stain on the character of Alphonso the Second. 
The eccentricities of his deluded fancy could not 
have justified seven years of solitary confinement, 
either as a medicine or as a punishment, least of all 
from the man whose name he had so loudly cele- 
brated in one of the most glorious productions of 
modern genius. What a caustic commentary upon 



460 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

his unrelenting rigour must Alphonso have found in 
one of the opening stanzas of the Jerusalem : 

" Tu, magnanimo Alfonso, il qual ritogli 

Al furor di fortuna, e guidi in porto 
Me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli 

E fra Tonde agitato, e quasi assorto ; 
Queste mie carte in lieta fronte accogli,'* &c. 

The ilHberal conduct of the princes ofEste, both 
towards Ariosto and Tasso, essentially diminishes 
their pretensions to the munificent patronage so ex- 
clusively imputed to them by their own historians, 
and by the eloquent pen of Gibbon * A more ac- 
curate picture, perhaps, of the second Alphonso may 
be found in the concluding canto of Childe Harold, 
where the poet, in the language of indignant sensi- 
bility, not always so judiciously directed, has ren- 
dered more than poetical justice to the " antique 
brood of Este." 

The Jerusalem was surreptitiously published, for 
the first time, during Tasso's imprisonment, and, 
notwithstanding the extreme inaccuracy of its early 
editions, it went through no less than six in as many 
months. Others grew rich on the productions of an 
author who was himself languishing in the most ab- 

* Muratori's Antkhita Estensi are expressly intended to record the 
virtues of the family of Este. Tiraboschi's Storia della Letteratura lial- 
iana is a splendid panegyric upon the intellectual achievements of the 
whole nation. More than a due share of this praise, however, is claim- 
ed for his native princes of Ferrara. It is amusing to see by what eva- 
sions the historian attempts to justify their conduct both towards Tasso 
and Ariosto. Gibbon, who had less apology for partiality, in his laborious 
researches into the " Antiquities of the House of Brunswick" has not 
tempered his encomiums of the Alphonsos with a single animadversion 
vipon their illiberal conduct towards their two illustrious subjects. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 461 

ject poverty ; one example out of many of the in- 
security of literary property in a country where the 
number of distinct independent governments almost 
defeats the protection of a copyright * 

Notwithstanding the general admiration which 
the Jerusalem excited throughout Italy, it was as- 
sailed, on its first appearance, with the coarsest crit- 
icism it ever experienced. A comparison was nat- 
urally suggested between it and the Orlando Furioso, 
and the Italians became divided into the factions of 
Tassisti and Ariostisti. The Delia Cruscan Acad- 
emy, just then instituted, in retaliation of some ex- 
travagant encomiums bestowed on the Jerusalem, 
entered into an accurate, but exceedingly intemper- 
ate analysis of it, in which they degraded it, not 
only below the rival epic, but, denying it the name 
0^3. poem, spoke of it as "a cold and barren compi- 
lation." It is a curious fact, that both the Delia 
Cruscan and French Academies commenced their 
career of criticism with an unlucky attack upon two 
of the most extraordinary poems in their respective 
languages.! 

Although Tasso was only one-and-twenty years 
of age when he set about writing his Jerusalem, yet 
it is sufficiently apparent, from the sagacious criticism 
exhibited in his letters, that he brought to it a mind 

* " Foreigners," says Denina, " who ask if there are great writers in 
Italy now, as in times past, would be surprised at the number, were they 
to learn how much even the oest of them are brought in debt by the pub- 
lication of their own works." — Vicende della Lditeraiura, torn, ii., p. 326. 

t It is hardly necessary to refer to Corneille's " Cid,'' so clumsily anat- 
omized by the Academic Frangaise at the jealous instigation of Cardinal 
Richelieu. 



462 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ripened by extensive studies and careful meditation. 
He had, moreover, the advantage of an experience 
derived both from his own previous labours and 
those of several distinguished predecessors in the 
same kind of composition. The learned Trissino 
had fashioned, some years before, a regular heroic 
poem, with pedantic precision, upon the models of 
antiquity. From this circumstance, it was so formal 
and tedious that nobody could read it. Bernardo 
Tasso, the father of Torquato, who might apply to 
himself, with equal justice, the reverse of the younger 
Racine's lament, 

" Et moi pere inconnu d'un si glorieux fils," 

had commenced his celebrated Amadis with the 
same deference to the rules of Aristotle. Finding 
that the audiences of his friends, to whom he was 
accustomed to read the epic as it advanced, grad- 
ually thinned off, he had the discretion to take the 
hint, and new cast it in a more popular and roman- 
tic form. Notwithstanding these inauspicious ex- 
amples, Tasso was determined to give to his national 
literature what it so much wanted, a great heroic 
poem ; his fine eye perceived at once, however, all 
the advantages to be derived from the peculiar insti- 
tutions of the moderns, and, while he conformed, in 
the general plan of his epic, to the precepts of an- 
tiquity, he animated it with the popular and more 
exalted notions of love, of chivalry, and of rehgion. 
His Jerusalem exhibits a perfect combination of the 
romantic and the classical. 

The subject which he selected was most happily 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 463 

adapted to his complicated design. However gloomy 
a picture the Crusades may exhibit to the rational 
historian, they are one of the most brilliant and im- 
posing ever offered to the eye of the poet. It is 
surprising that a subject so fruitful in marvellous and 
vrarlike adventure, and which displays the full tri- 
umph of Christian chivalry, should have been so 
long neglected by the writers of epical romance. 
The plan of the Jerusalem is not without defects, 
which have been pointed out by the Italians, and 
bitterly ridiculed by Voltaire, whose volatile sarcasms 
have led him into one or two blunders, that have 
excited much wrath among some of Tasso's coun- 
trymen."^ The conceits which occasionally glitter 
on the surface of Tasso's clear and polished style 
have afforded another and a fair ground for censure. 
Boileau's metaphorical distich, however, has given 
to them an undeserved importance. The epithet 
tinsel (clinquant), used by him without any Umita- 
tion, was quoted by his countrymen as fixing the 
value at once of all Tasso's compositions, and after- 
ward, by an easy transition, of that of the whole 
body of Italian literature. Boileau subsequently di- 
luted this censure of the Italian poet with some par- 
tial commendations ;t but its ill effects were visible 

* Among other heinous slanders, he had termed the musical bird " di 
color vari" " e purpureo rostro" in Armida's gardens, a ''parrot,'" and the 
" fatal Donzella" (canto xv.), " whose countenance was beautiful like 
that of the angels," an '^ old woman,'''' which his Italian censor assures 
his countrymen " is much worse than a vecchia donna.^' For the burst 
of indignation which these and similar sins brought upon Voltaire's head, 
vide " Annotazioni ai Canti," xv., xvi. Clas. Ital. 

t Both Ginguene and some Italian critics affect to consider these com- 



464 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

in the unfavourable prejudices which it left on the 
minds of his own countrymen, and on those of the 
English for nearly a century. 

The affectations imputed to Tasso are to be tra- 
ced to a much more remote origin. Petrarch's best 
productions are stained with them, as are those of 
preceding poets, Cino da Pistoja, Guido Cavalcanti, 
and others,* and they seem to have flowed directly 
from the Proven9ale, the copious fountain of Italian 
lyrical poetry. Tiraboschi referred their introduc- 
tion to the influence of Spanish literature under the 
viceroys of Naples during the latter part of the six- 
teenth century, which provoked a patriotic replica- 
tion, in seven volumes, from the Spanish Abbe Lam- 
pillas. The Italian had the better of his adversary 
in temper, if not in argument This false refinement 
was brought to its height during the first half of the 
seventeenth century, under Marini and his imitators, 
and it is somewhat maliciously intimated by Denina 
that the foundation of the Academy Delia Crusca 
corresponds with the commencement of the decay of 

mendations as an amende honorable on the part of Boileau. They, how- 
ever, amount to very little, and, like the Frenchman's compliment to 
Yorick, have full as much of bitter as of sweet in them. The remarks 
quoted by D'Olivet (Histoire de 1' Academic Frangaise), as having been 
made by the critic a short time previous to his death, are a convincing 
proof, on the other hand, that he was tenacious to the last of his original 
heresy. " So little," said he, " have I changed, that, on reviewing Tasso 
of late, I regretted exceedingly that I had not been more explicit in my 
strictures upon him." He then goes on to supply the hiatus by taking 
up all the blemishes in detail which he had before only alluded to en gros. 
* These veteran versifiers have been condensed into two volumes 
8vo, in an edition published at Florence, 1816, under the title of Poeti del 
Primo Secolo. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 465 

good taste."^ Some of their early publications prove 
that they have at least as good a claim to be consid- 
ered its promoters as Tasso.f 

Tasso is the most lyrical of all epic poets. This 
often weakens the significance and picturesque de- 
lineation of his narrative, by giving to it an ideal 
and too general character. His eight line stanza is 
frequently wrought up, as it were, into a miniature 
sonnet. He himself censures Ariosto for occasion- 
ally indulging this lyrical vein in his romance, and 
cites as an example the celebrated comparison of 
the virgin and the rose (can. i., s. 42). How many 
similar examples may be found in his own epic ! 
The gardens of Armida are full of them. To this 
cause we may perhaps ascribe the glittering affecta- 
tions, the clinquant so often noticed in his poetry. 
Dazzling and epigrammatic points are often solicit- 
ed in sonnets. To the same cause may be referred, 
in part, the nicely-adjusted harmony of his verses. 

* Vicende della Letteratura, torn, ii., p. 52. 

t A distinction seems to be authorized between the ancients and the 
moderns in regard to what is considered purity of taste. The earliest 
writings of the former are distinguished by it, and it fell into decay only 
with the decline of the nation; while a vicious taste is visible in the 
earliest stages of modern literature, and it has been corrected only by 
the corresponding refinement of the nation. The Greek language was 
written in classic purity from Homer until long after Greece herself had 
become tributary to the Romans, and the Latin tongue from the time 
of Terence till the nation had sacrificed its liberties to its emperors ; 
while the early Italian authors, as we have already seen, the Spaniards 
in the age of Ferdinand, the English in that of Elizabeth, and the French 
under Francis the First (the epochs which may fix the dawn of their re- 
spective literatures), seem to have been deeply infected with a passion 
for conceits and quibbles, which has been purified only by the diligent 
cultivation of ages. 

N N N 



466 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

It would almost seem as if each stanza was meant 
to be set to music, as Petrarch is known to have 
composed many of his odes with this view.* The 
melodious rhythm of Tasso's verse has none of the 
monotonous sweetness so cloying in Metastasio. It 
is diversified by all the modulations of an exquisite- 
ly sensible ear. For this reason, no Italian poet is 
so frequently in the mouths of the common people. 
Ariosto's familiar style and lively narrative are bet- 
ter suited to the popular apprehension ; but the lyr- 
ical melody of Tasso triumphs over these advantages 
in his rival, and enables him literally virum volitare 
per ora. It was once common for the Venetian 
gondohers to challenge each other, and to respond 
in the verses of the Jerusalem, and this sort of mu- 
sical contest might be heard for hours in the silence 
of a soft summer evening. The same beautiful bal- 
lads, if we may so call these fragments of an epic, 
are still occasionally chanted by the Italian peasant, 
who is less affected by the subhmity of their senti- 
ments than the musical flow of the expression.f 

Tasso's sentiments are distinguished, in our opin- 
ion, by a moral grandeur surpassing tbat of any other 
Italian poet. His devout mind seems to have been 
fully inspired with the spirit of his subject. We say 
in our opinion, for an eminent German critic, F. 

* Foscolo, " Essay,'' &c., p. 93. 

t "The influence of metrical harmony is visible in the lower classes, 
who commit to memory the stanzas of Tasso, and sing them without 
comprehending them. They even disfigure the language so as to make 
nonsense of it, their senses deceived all the while by the unmeaning 
melody." — Pignotti, Storia, &c., torn, iv., p. 192. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 467 

Schlegel, is disposed to deny him this merit. We 
think in this instance he must have proposed to him- 
self what is too iVequent with the Germans, an ideal 
and exaggerated standard of elevation. A few stan- 
zas (st. 1 to 19) in the fomth canto of the Jerusalem 
may be said to contain almost the whole argument 
of the Paradise Lost. The convocation of the dev- 
ils in the dark abyss,* the picture of Satan, whom he 
injudiciously names Pluto, his sublime address to his 
confederates, in which he alludes to their rebellion 
and the subsequent creation of man, were the germs 
of Milton's most glorious conceptions. Dante had 
before shadowed forth Satan, but it was only in the 
physical terrors of a hideous aspect and gigantic 
stature. The ancients had clothed the Furies in 
the same external deformities. Tasso, in obedience 
to the superstitions of his age, gave to the devil 
similar attributes, but he invested his character with 
a moral sublimity which raised it to the rank of di- 
vine intelligences : 

" Ebbero i piu felici allor vittoria 
Rimase a noi d'invitto ardir la gloria." 
" Sia destin cio ch'io voglio." 

In the literal version of Milton, 

" What I will is fate." 

Sentiments hke these also give to Satan, in Paradise 

* The semi-stanza, which describes the hoarse reverberations of the 
infernal trumpet in this Pandemonium, is cited by the Italians as a happy- 
example of imitative harmony : 

" Chiama gli abitator dell'ombre eterne 
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba. 
Treman le spaziose atre caverne, 

E I'aer cieco a quel romor rimbomba." 



468 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Lost, his superb and terrific majesty. Milton, how- 
ever, gave a finer finish to the portrait, by dispen- 
sing akogether w^ith the bugbear deformities of his 
person, and by depicting it as a form that 

" Had yet not lost 
All its original brightness, nor appear'd 
Less than archangel ruin'd." 

It seems to us a capital mistake in Tasso to have 
made so little use of the diablerie which he has so 
powerfully portrayed. Almost all the machinations 
of the infidels in the subsequent cantos turn upon 
the agency of petty necromancers. 

Tasso frequently deepens the expression of his 
pictures by some skilful moral allusion. How finely 
has he augmented the misery of the soldier, perish- 
ing under a consuming drought before the walls of 
Jerusalem, by recalling to his imagination the cool 
and crystal waters with which he had once been 
famihar : 

" Se alcun giammai tra frondeggianti rive 
Puro vide stagnar liquido argento, 
O giu preeipitose ir acque vive 

Per Alpe, o'n piaggia erbosa a passo lento ; 
Quelle al vago desio forma e descrive, 
E ministra materia al suo tormento ; 
Che I'imagine lor gelida e molle 

L'asciuga e scalda, e nel pensier ribolle."* 

Can. XIII., St. 60. 

* "He that the gliding rivers erst had seen 

Adown their verdant channels gently roll'd, 
Or falling streams, which to the valleys green 

Distiird from tops of Alpine mountains cold, 
Those he desired in vain, new torments been 

Augmented thus with wish of comforts old ; 
Those waters cool he drank in vain conceit. 

Which more increased his thirst, increased his heat." — Fairfax. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 469 

In all the manifold punishments of Dante's " Hell" 
we rememher one only in which the mind is made 
use of as a means of torture. A counterfeiter (har- 
ratiere) contrasts his situation in these dismal regions 
with his former pleasant residence in the green vale 
of the Arno ; an allusion which adds a new sting to 
his anguish, and gives a fine moral colouring to the 
picture. Dante was the first great Christian poet 
that had written ; and when, in conformity with the 
charitable spirit of his age, he assigned all the an- 
cient heathens a place either in his hell or purga- 
tory, he inflicted upon them corporeal punishments 
which alone had been threatened by their poets. 

Both Ariosto and Tasso elaborated the style of 
their compositions with infinite pains. This labour, 
however, led them to the most opposite results. It 
gave to the Furioso the airy graces of elegant con- 
versation ; to the Gerusalemme a stately and impo- 
sing eloquence. In this last you may often find a 
consummate art carried into afiectation, as in the 
former natural beauty is sometimes degraded into 
vulgarity, and even obscenity. Ariosto has none of 
the national vices of style imputed to his rival, but 
he is tainted with the less excusable impurities of 
sentiment. It is stated by a late writer that the ex- 
ceptionable passages in the Furioso were found 
crossed out with a pen in a manuscript copy of the 
author, showing his intention to have suppressed 
ihem at some future period. The fact does not ap- 
pear probable, since the edition, as it now stands, 
with all its original blemishes, was revised and pub- 
lished by himself the year of his death. 



470 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Tasso possessed a deeper, a more abstracted, and 
lyrical turn of thought. Ariosto infuses an active, 
worldly spirit into his poetry ; his beauties are social, 
while those of his rival are rather of a solitary com- 
plexion. Ariosto's muse seems to have caught the 
gossiping spirit of the fabliaux, and Tasso's the lyr- 
ical refinements o{ the Provengale. Ariosto is seldom 
sublime like the other. This may be imputed to 
his subject, as well as to the character of his genius. 
Owing to his subject, he is more generally entertain- 
ing. The easy freedom of his narrative often leads 
him into natural details much more affecting than 
the ideal generalization of Tasso. How pathetic 
is the dying scene of Brandimarte, with the half-fin- 
ished name of his mistress, Fiordiligi, upon his lip ; 

" Orlando, fa che ti raccordi 
Di me nell' orazion tue grate a Dio ; 

Ne men ti raccomando la mia Fiordi .... 
Ma dir non pote ligi ; e qui finio."* 

Tasso could never have descended to this beautiful 
negligence of expression.f 

* " Orlando, I implore thee 

That in thy prayers my name may be commended, 
And to thy care I leave my loved Fiordi — 
Ligi he could not add ; but here he ended." 

t The ideal, v^^hich we have imputed to Tasso, may be cited, however, 
as a characteristic of the national literature, and as the point in which 
their literature is most decidedly opposed to our own. With the excep- 
tion of Dante and Parini, whose copies from hfe have all the precision 
of proof impressions, it would be difficult to find a picture in the compass 
of Italian poetry executed with the fidelity to nature so observable in our 
good authors, so apparent in every page of Cowper or Thomson, for 
example. It might be well, perhaps, for the English artist, if he could 
embellish the minute and literal details of his own school with some of 
the ideal graces of the Italian. Byron may be considered as having done 
this more effectually than any contemporary poet. Byron's love of the 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 471 

Tasso challenged a comparison with his prede- 
cessor in his gardens of Armida. The indolent and 
languishing repose of the one, the brisk, amorous 
excitement of the other, are in some measure char- 
acteristic of their different pencils. The parallel 
has been too often pursued for us to weary our read- 
ers with it. 

The Italians have a copious variety of narrative 
poetry, and are very nice in their subdivisions of it. 
Without attending to these, we have been guided 
by its chronological succession. We have hardly 
room to touch upon the " Secchia Rapita" {Rape of 
the Buckef) of Tassoni, the model of the mock-he- 
roic poems afterward frequent in Italy,* of Boileau's 
Lutrin, and of the Rape of the Lock. Tassoni, its 
author, was a learned and noble Modenese, who, af- 
ter a life passed in the heats of literary controversies, 
to which he had himself given rise, died 1635, aged 
seventy-one. The subject of the poem is a war be- 

ideal, it must be allowed, however, has too often bewildered him in mys- 
ticism and hyperbole. 

* The Italians long disputed with great acrimony whether this or the 
comic heroic poem of Bracciolini {Lo Scherno dcgli Dei) was precedent 
in point of age. It appears probable that Tassoni's was written first, 
although printed last. No country has been half so fruitful as Italy in 
literary quarrels, and in none have they been pursued with such bitter- 
ness and pertinacity. In some instances, as in that of Marini, they have 
even been maintained by assassination. The sarcastic commentaries 
of Galileo upon the " Jerusalem," quoted in the vulgar edition of the 
" Classics," were found sadly mutilated by one of the offended Tassisti^ 
into whose hands they had fallen more than two centuries after they 
were written ; so long does a literary faction last in Italy ! The Ital- 
ians, inhibited from a free discussion on political or religious topics, en- 
ter with incredible zeal into those of a purely abstract and often unim- 
portant character. 



472 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tween Modena and Bologna, at the commencenient 
of the thirteenth century, in consequence of a wood- 
en bucket having been carried off from the market- 
place in the latter city by an invading party of the 
former. This memorable trophy has been preserved 
down to the present day in the Cathedral of Modena. 
Tassoni's epic will confer upon it a more lasting ex- 
istence. 

'* The Bucket, which so sorely had offended, 

In the Great Tower, where yet it may be found, 

Was from on high by ponderous chain suspended, 
And with a marble cope environ'd round. 

By portals five the entrance is defended ; 
Nor cavalier of note is that way bound. 

Nor pious pilgrim, but doth pause to see 

The spoil so glorious of the victory." — Canto i., st. 63 

Gironi, in his life of the poet, triumphantly addu- 
ces, in evidence of the superiority of the Italian epic 
over the French mock-heroic poem of Boileau, that 
the subject of the former is far more insignificant 
than that of the latter, and yet the poem has twelve 
cantos, being twice the number of the Lutrin. He 
might have added that each canto contains about 
six hundred lines instead of two hundred, the aver- 
age complement of the French, so that Tassoni's 
epic has the glory of being twelve times as long as 
Boileau's, and all about a bucket ! This is some- 
what characteristic of the Itahans. What other peo- 
ple would good-humouredly endure such an inter- 
minable epic upon so trivial an affair, which had 
taken place more than four centuries before ? To 
make amends, however, for the want of pungency 
in a satire on transactions of such an antiquated date, 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 473 

Tassoni has besprinkled his poem very liberally with 
allusions to living characters. 

We may make one general objection to the poem, 
that it is often too much in earnest for the perfect 
keeping of the mock heroic. The cutting of throats 
and fighting regular pitched battles are too bloody a 
business for a joke. How much more in the genu- 
ine spirit of this species of poetry is the bloodless 
battle with the books in the Lutrin ! 

The machinery employed by Tassoni is compo- 
sed of the ancient heathen deities. These are fre- 
quently brought upon the stage, and are travestied 
with the coarsest comic humour. But the burlesque 
which reduces great things to little is of a grosser 
and much less agreeable sort than that which mag- 
nifies little things into great. The "Rape of the 
Lock" owes its charms to the latter process. The 
importance which it gives to the elegant nothings 
of high life, its perpetual sparkling of wit, the fairy 
fretwork which constitutes its machinery, have made 
it superior, as a fine piece of irony, to either of its 
foreign rivals. A Frenchman would doubtless pre- 
fer the epic regularity, progressive action, and smooth 
seesaw versification of the Lutrin f while an Itahan 
would find sufficient in the grand heroic sentiment 
and the voluptuous portraiture with which Tassoni's 
unequal poem is occasionally inlaid, to justify his 



* The versification of the Lutrin is esteemed as faultless as any in the 
language. The tame and monotonous flow of the best of French rhyme, 
however, produces an effect, at least upon a foreign ear, which has been 
well likened by one of their own nation to " the drinking of cold water." 

O o o 



474 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

preference of it There is no accounting for na- 
tional taste. La Harpe, the Aristarchus of French 
critics, censures the gossamer macliinery of the 
"Rape of the Lock" as the greatest defect in the 
poem. " La fable des Sjlphes, que Pope a tres inu- 
tilement empruntee du Conte de Gabalis, pour en 
faire le merveilleux de son poeme, n'y produit rien 
d'agr Sable, rien d' inter essant r 

Italy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
was inundated with crude and insipid romances, 
distributed into all the varieties of epic poetry. The 
last one, however, of sufficient importance to require 
our notice, namely, the Ricciardetto of Nicholas For- 
tiguerra, appeared as late as 1738. After two cen- 
turies of marvellous romance, Charlemagne and his 
paladins became rather insipid dramatis personse. 
What could not be handled seriously, however, 
might be ridiculed ; and the smile, half suppressed 
by Ariosto and Berni, broke out into broad buffoon- 
ery in the poem of Fortiguerra. 

The Ricciardetto may be considered the Don 
Quixote of Italy ; for although it did not bring about 
that revolution in the national taste ascribed to the 
Spanish romance, yet it is, like that, an unequivocal 
parody upon the achievements of knight errantry. 
It may be doubted whether Don Quixote itself was 
not the consequence rather than the cause of the 
revolution in the national taste. Fortiguerra pursued 
an opposite method to Cervantes, and, instead of in- 
troducing his crack-brained heroes into the realities 
of vulgar hfe, he made them equally ridiculous by 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 475 

involving them in the most absm'd caricatures of ro- 
mantic fiction. Many of these adventures are of a 
hcentious, and sometimes of a disgusting natiu'e ; but 
the graceful though negligent beauties of his style 
throw an illusive veil over the grossness of the nar- 
rative. Imitations of Pulci may be more frequently 
traced than of any other romantic poet. But, al- 
though more celebrated writers are occasionally, and 
the extravagances of chivalry are perpetually paro- 
died by Fortiguerra, yet his object does not seem to 
have been deliberate satire so much as good-humour- 
ed jesting. What he wrote was for the simple pur- 
pose of raising a laugh, not for the derision or the cor- 
rection of the taste of his countrymen. The tenden- 
cy of his poem is certainly satirical, yet there is not 
a line indicating such an intention on his part. The 
most pointed humour is aimed at the clergy.* For- 
tiguerra was himself a canon. He commenced his 
epic at the suggestion of some friends with whom 
he was passing a few weeks of the autumn at a hunt- 
ing seat. The conversation turned upon the labour 
bestowed by Pulci, Berni, and Ariosto on their great 

* One of the leading characters is Ferragus, who had figured in all 
the old epics as one of the most formidable Saracen chieftains. He 
turns hermit with Fortiguerra, and beguiles his lonely winter evenings 
with the innocent pastime of making candles. 

<' E ne I'orrida bruma 
Quando I'aria e piu fredda, e piu crudele, 
lo mi diverto in far de le candele." — m., 53. 

A contrast highly diverting to the Italians, who had been taught to as- 
sociate very lofty ideas with the name of Ferragus. The conflict kept 
up between the devout scruples of the new saint and his old heathen 
appetites aifords perpetual subjects for the profane comi. 



476 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

poems ; and Fortigaerra undertook to furnish, the 
next day, a canto of good poetry, exhibiting some of 
the peculiarities of their respective styles. He ful- 
filled his promise, and his friends, deUghted with its 
sprightly graces, persuaded him to pursue the epic 
to its present complement of thirty cantos. Any 
one acquainted with the facilities for iirfprovisation 
afforded by the flexible organization of the Italian 
tongue will be the less surprised at the rapidity of 
this composition. The "Ricciardetto" may be look- 
ed upon as a sort of improvisation. 

In the following literal version of the two opening 
stanzas of the poem we have attempted to convey 
some notion of the sportive temper of the original : 

*' It will not let my busy brain alone ; 

The whim has taken me to write a tale 
In poetry, of things till now unknown, 

Or if not wholly new, yet nothing stale. 
My muse is not a daughter of the Sun, 
With harp of gold and ebony ; a hale 
And buxom country lass, she sports at ease, 
And, free as air, sings to the passing breeze 
" Yet, though accustom'd to the wood—its spring 
Her only beverage, and her food its mast, 
She will of heroes and of battles sing, 

The loves and high emprizes of the past. 
Then if she falter on so bold a wing. 

Light be the blame upon her errors cast ; 
She never studied ; and she well may err, 
W'hose home hath been beneath the oak and fir." 

Fortiguerra's introductions to his cantos are sea- 
soned with an extremely pleasant wit, which Lord 
Byron has attentively studied, and, in some passages 
of his more famiUar poetry, closely imitated. The 
stanza, for example, in Beppo, beginning 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 477 

" She was not old, nor young, nor at the years 
Which certain people call a certain age, 
Which yet the most uncertain age appears," &c., 

was evidently suggested by the following in Ricci- 
ardetto ; 

" Quando si giugne ad una certa eta, 
Ch'io non voglio descrivervi qual e, 

Bisogna stare allora a quel ch'un ha, 
Ne d'altro amante provar piu la fe, 

Perche, donne me care, la belta 

Ha r ali al capo, alle spalle, ed a' pie ; 

E vola si, che non si scorge piu 

Vestigio alcun ne' visi, dove fu." 

Byron's wit, however, is pointed with a keener sar- 
casm, and his serious reflections show a finer per- 
ception, both of natural and moral beauty, than be- 
long to the Italian. No two things are more remote 
from each other than sentiment and satire. In 
"Don Juan" they are found side by side in almost 
every stanza. The effect is disagreeable. The 
heart, warmed by some picture of extreme beauty 
or pathos, is suddenly chilled by a selfish sneer, a 
cold-blooded maxim, that makes you ashamed of 
having been duped into a good feeling by the writer 
even for a moment. It is a melancholy reflection, 
that the last work of this extraordinary poet should 
be the monument alike of his genius and his infamy. 
Voltaire's licentious epic, the " Pucehe," is written 
in a manner, perhaps, more nearly corresponding to 
that of the Itahan ; but the philosophical irony, if 
w^e may so call it, which forms the substratum of the 
more familiar compositions of this witty and profli- 
gate author, is of somewhat too deep a cast for the 
light, superficial banter of Fortiguerra. 



478 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

We have now traced the course of Italian narra- 
tive poetry down to the middle of the last century. 
It has by no means become extinct since that pe- 
riod, and, among others, an author well known here 
by his history of our Revolutionary war has con- 
tributed his share to the epopee of his country, in 
his " Camillo, o Vejo Conquistata." Almost every 
Italian writer has a poetic vein within him, which, 
if it does not find a vent in sonnets or canzones, will 
flow out into more formidable compositions.* 

In glancing over the long range of Italian narra- 
tive poems, one may be naturally led to the reflec- 
tion that the most prohfic branch of the national 
literature is devoted exclusively to purposes of mere 
amusement. Brilliant inventions, deUcate humour, 
and a beautiful colouring of language are lavished 
upon all ; but with the exception of the " Jerusalem," 
we rarely meet with sublime or ennobling sentiment, 
and very rarely with anything like a moral or philo- 
sophical purpose. Madame de Stael has attempted 
to fasten a reproach on the wdiole body of Itahan 
letters, " that, with the exception of their works on 
physical science, they have never been directed to 
utility"^ The imputation applied in this almost 
unquahfied manner is unjust. The language has 
been enriched by the valuable reflections of too many 
historians, the solid labours of too many antiquaries 

* Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Bembo, Varchi, Castiglione, Pignotti, Botta, 
and a host of other classic prose writers of Italy, have all confessed the 
" impetus sacer," and given birth to epics, lyrics, or bucolics. 

t " Tous les ouvrages des Italiens, excepte ceux qui traitent des sci- 
ences physiques, n'ont jamais pour but I'utilite." — Be la Litterature, <SfC. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 479 

and critics, to be thus lightly designated. The learn- 
ed lady may have found a model for her own com- 
prehensive manner of philosophizing, and an ample 
refutation of her assertion in Machiavelli alone.* 
In their v^orks of imagination, however, such an im- 
putation appears to be well merited. The Italians 
seemed to demand from these nothing farther than 
from a fine piece of music, where the heart is stir- 
red, the ear soothed, but the understanding not a 
whit refreshed. The splendid apparitions of their 
poet's fancy fade away from the mind of the reader, 
and, like the enchanted fabrics described in their ro- 
mances, leave not a trace behind them. 

In the works of fancy in our language, fiction is 
almost universally made subservient to more impor- 
tant and nobler purposes. The ancient drama, and 
novels, the modern prose drama, exhibit historical 
pictures of manners and accurate deUneations of 
character. Most of the English poets in other 
walks, from the " moral Gower" to Cowper, Crabbe, 
and Wordsworth, have made their verses the ele- 
gant vehicles of religious or practical truth. Even 

* We say manner, not spirit. The " Discors isopra T. Livio," how- 
ever, require less qualification on the score of their principles. They 
obviously furnished the model to the " Grandeur et Decadence des Ro- 
mains," and the same extended philosophy which Montesquieu imitated 
in civil history, Madame de Stael has carried into literary. 

Among the historians, antiquaries, &c., whose names are known where 
the language is not read, we might cite Guicciardini, Bembo, Sarpi, Gi- 
annone, Nardi, Davila, Denina, Muratori, Tiraboschi, Gravina, Bettinelli, 
Algarotti, Beccaria, Filanghieri, Cesarotti, Pignotti, and many others ; 
a hollow muster-roll of names that it would be somewhat ridiculous to 
run over, did not their wide celebrity expose, in a stronger light, Mad 
ame de Stael's sweeping assertion. 



480 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

descriptive poetry in England interprets the silence 
of external nature into a language of sentiment and 
devotion. It is characteristic of this spirit in the 
nation that Spenser, the only one of their classic 
writers who has repeated the fantastic legends of 
chivalry, deemed it necessary to veil his ItaUan fancy 
in a cloud of allegory, which, however it may be 
thought to affect the poem, shows unequivocally the 
didactic intention of the poet. 

These grave and extended views are seldom visi-, 
ble in the ornamental writing of the Italians. It 
rarely conveys useful information, or inculcates moral 
or practical truth ; but it is too commonly an ele- 
gant, unprofitable pastime. Novelle, lyrical, and epic 
poetry may be considered as constituting three prin- 
cipal streams of their lighter literature. These have 
continued to flow, with little interruption, the two 
first from the " golden urns" of Petrarch and Boc- 
caccio, the last from the early sources we have al- 
ready traced down to the present day. Their mul- 
titudinous novelle, with all their varieties of tragic 
and comic incident, the last by far the mo^t frequent, 
present few just portraitures of character, still fewer 
examples of sound ethics or wise philosophy.* In 
the exuberance of their sonnets and canzone, we find 
some, it is true, animated by an efficient spirit of re- 

* The heavier charge of indecency lies upon many. The Novelle of 
Casti, published as late as 1804, make the foulest tales of Boccaccio ap- 
pear fair beside them. They have run through several editions since 
their first appearance, and it tells not well for the land that a numerous 
class of readers can be found in it who take delight in banqueting upon 
such abominable offal. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 481 

ligion or patriotism ; but too frequently they are of 
a purely amatory nature, the unsubstantial though 
brilliant exhalations of a heated fancy. The pas- 
toral drama, the opera, and other beautiful varieties 
of invention, which, under the titles of Bernesco, 
Burlesco, Maccheronico, and the like, have been 
nicely classed according to their different modifica- 
tions of style and humour, while they manifest the 
mercurial temper and the originality of the nation, 
confirm the justice of our position. 

The native melody of the Itahan tongue, by se- 
ducing their writers into an overweening attention 
to sound, has doubtless been in one sense prejudicial 
to their literature. We do not mean to imply, in 
conformity with a vulgar opinion, that the language 
is deficient in energy or compactness. Its harmony 
is no proof of its weakness. It allows more licenses 
of contraction than any other European tongue, and 
retains more than any other the vigorous inversions 
of its Latin original. Dante is the most concise of 
early moderns, and we know none superior to Alfi- 
eri in this respect among those of our own age. 
Davanzati's literal translation of Tacitus is conden- 
sed into a smaller compass than its original, the most 
sententious of ancient histories ; but still the silver 
tones of a language that almost sets itself to music 
as it is spoken, must have an undue attraction for 
the harmonious ear of an Italian. Their very first 
classical model of prose composition is an obvious 
example of it. 

The frequency oH7nprovisation is another circum- 
Ppp 



482 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Stance that has naturally tended to introduce a less 
serious and thoughtful habit of composition. Above 
all, the natural perceptions of an Italian seem to be 
pecuUarly sensible to heauty, independent of every 
other quahty. Any one who has been in Italy must 
have recognised the glimpses of a pure taste through 
the rags of the meanest beggar. The musical pieces, 
when first exhibited at the theatre of St. Carlos, are 
correctly pronounced upon by the Lazzaroni of Na- 
ples, and the mob of Florence decide with equal ac- 
curacy upon the productions of their immortal school. 
Cellini tells us that he exposed his celebrated statue 
of Perseus in the public square by order of his pa- 
tron, Duke Cosmo First, who declared himself per- 
fectly satisfied with it on learning the commenda- 
tions of the people.* It is not extraordinary that 
this exquisite sensibility to the beautiful should have 
also influenced them in literary art, and have led 
them astray sometimes from the substantial and the 
useful. Who but an Itahan historian would, in this 
practical age, so far blend fact and fiction as, for the 
sake of rhetorical effect, to introduce into the mouths 
of his personages sentiments and speeches never ut- 
tered by them, as Botta has lately done in his his- 
tory of the American War 1 

In justice, however, to the Italians, we must ad- 
mit, that the reproach incurred by too concentrated 
an attention to beauty, to the exclusion of more en- 
larged and useful views in their lighter compositions, 
does not fall upon this or the last century. They 

* Vita di Bcnvo. Cellin.j torn, ii., p. 339. 



i 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 483 

have imbibed a graver and more philosophical cast 
of reflection, for which they seem partly indebted to 
the influence of English literature. Several of their 
most eminent authors have either visited or resided 
in Great Britain, and the genius of the language has 
been made known through the medium of skilful 
translations. Alfieri has transported into his trage- 
dies the solemn spirit and vigorous characterization 
peculiar to the English. He somewhere remarks 
that " he could not read the language ;" but we are 
persuaded his stern pen would never have traced the 
dying scene of Saul, had he not witnessed a repre- 
sentation of Macbeth. Ippolito Pindemonte, in his 
descriptive pieces, has deepened the tones of his na- 
tive idiom with the moral melancholy of Gray and 
Cowper. Monti's compositions, both dramatic and 
miscellaneous, bear frequent testimony to his avowed 
admiration for Shakspeare ; and Cesarotti, Foscolo, 
and Pignotti have introduced the " severer muses" 
of the north to a stifl wider and more familiar ac- 
quaintance with their countrymen.* Lastly, among 
the works of fancy which attest the practical scope 
of Italian letters in the last century, we must not 
omit the " Giorno" of Parini, the most curious and 
nicely-elaborated specimen of didactic satire produ- 
ced in any age or country. Its polished irony, point- 

* Both the prose and poetry of Foscolo are pregnant with more se- 
rious meditation and warmer patriotism than is usual in the works of 
the Italians. Pignotti, although his own national manner has been but 
little affected by his foreign erudition, has contributed more than any 
other to extend the influence of English letters among his countrymen. 
His works abound in allusions to them, and two of his principal poems 
are dedicated to the memory of Shakspeare and of Pope. 



484 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ed at the domestic vices of the Itahan nobihty, indi- 
cates both the profligacy of the nation and the moral 
independence of the poet. 

The ItaUan language, the first-born of those de- 
scended from the Latin, is also the most beautiful. 
It is not surprising that a people endowed with an 
exquisite sensibility to beauty should have been 
often led to regard this language rather as a means 
of pleasure than of utility. We must not, however, 
so far yield to the unqualified imputation of Madame 
de Stael as to forget that they have other claims to 
our admiration than what arise from the inventions 
of the poet, or from the ideal beauties which they 
have revived of Grecian art; that the light of genius 
shed upon the world in the fourteenth, and that of 
learning in the fifteenth century, was all derived 
from Italy ; that her writers first unfolded the sub- 
limity of Christian doctrines as applied to modern 
literature, and by their patient, philological labours 
restored to life the buried literature of antiquity; 
that her schools revived and expounded the ancient 
code of law, since become the basis of so important 
a branch of jurisprudence both in Europe and our 
own country ; that she originated literary, and 
brought to a perfection unequalled in any other lan- 
guage, unless it be our own, civil and political his- 
tory ; that she led the way in physical science and 
in that of political philosophy ; and, finally, that of 
the two enUghtened navigators who divide the glory 
of adding a new quarter to the globe, the one was a 
Genoese and the other a Florentine. 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. 485 

In following down the stream of Italian narrative 
poetry, we have wandered into so many details, es- 
pecially where they would tend to throw light on 
the intellectual character of the nation, that we have 
little room, and our readers, doubtless, less patience, 
left for a discussion of the poems which form the 
text of our article. The few stanzas descriptive of 
Berni, which we have borrowed from the Innamo- 
rato, may give some notion of Mr. Rose's manner. 
The translations have been noticed in several of the 
English journals, and we perfectly accord with the 
favourable opinion of them, which has been so often 
expressed that it needs not here be repeated. 

The composite style of Ariosto owes its charms 
to the skill with which the delicate tints of his irony 
are mixed with the sober colouring of his narrative. 
His translators have spoiled the harmony of the 
composition by overcharging one or other of these 
ingredients. Harrington has caricatured his original 
into burlesque ; Hoole has degraded him into a most 
melancholy proser. The popularity of this latter 
version has been of infinite disservice to the fame of 
Ariosto, whose aerial fancy loses all its buoyancy 
under the heavy hexameters of the English transla- 
tor. The purity of Mr. Rose's taste has prevented 
him from exaggerating even the beauties of his 
original. 



486 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS.* 

JULY, 183L 

It is not our intention to go into an analysis, or 
even to discuss the merits of the works at the head 
of this article, which we have selected only as a text 
for such reflections on the poetry and ornamental 
prose- writing of the Italians as might naturally sug- 
gest themselves to an English reader. The points 
of view from which a native contemplates his own 
literature and those from which it is seen by a for- 
eigner are so dissimilar, that it would be hardly pos- 
sible that they should come precisely to the same 
results without affectation or servility on the part of 
the latter. The native, indeed, is far better qualified 
than any foreigner can be to estimate the produc- 
tions of his own countrymen ; but as each is sub- 
jected to pecuhar influences, truth may be more 
likely to be elicited from a colUsion of their mutual 
opinions than from those exclusively of either. 

The Italian, although the first modern tongue to 
produce what still endure as classical models of com- 
position, was, of all the Romance dialects, the last 

* [The reader may find in this article some inadvertent repetitions of 
what had been said in two articles written some years before, and cov- 
ering, in part, the same ground.] 

1. *' Delia Letteratura Italiana, Di Camillo Ugoni."— 3 tom. 12mo. 
Brescia, 1820. 

2. " Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Del cavaliere Giuseppe MafFei." 
—3 tom. 12mo. Milano, 1825. 

3. " Storia della Letteratura Italiana nel secolo XVIII. di Antonio 
Lombardi."— 3 tom. 8vo. Modena, 1827-9. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 487 

to be applied to literary purposes. The poem of the 
Cid, which, with all its rawness, exhibits the frank 
bearing of the age in a highly poetic aspect, was 
written nearly a century previously to this event. 
The northern French, which even some Itahan 
scholars of that day condescended to employ as the 
most popular vehicle of thought, had been richly 
cultivated, indemnifying itself in anticipation, as it 
were, by this extraordinary precocity, for the poetic 
sterility with which it has been cursed ever since. 
In the South, and along the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean, every remote corner was alive with the 
voice of song. A beautiful poetry had ripened into 
perfection there, and nearly perished, before the first 
lispings of the Italian muse were heard, not in her 
own land, but at the court of a foreigner, in Sicily. 
The poets of Lombardy wrote in the Provencal. 
The histories — and almost every city had its histo- 
rian, and some two or three — were composed in 
Latin, or in some half-formed, discordant dialect of 
the country. " The ItaUan of that age," says Tira- 
boschi, "more nearly resembled the Latin than the 
Tuscan does now any of her sister dialects." It 
seemed doubtful which of the conflicting idioms 
would prevail, when a mighty genius arose, who, 
collecting the scattered elements together, formed 
one of those wonderful creations which make an 
epoch in the history of civilization, and forever fixed 
the destinies of his language. 

We shall not trouble our readers with a particu- 
lar criticism on so popular a work as the Divine 



488 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Comedy, but confine ourselves to a few such desul- 
tory observations as have been suggested on a repe- 
rusal of it. The Inferno is more frequently quoted 
and eulogized than any other portion of the Corn- 
media. It exhibits a more marked progress of the 
action, and, while it affects us by its deepened pic- 
tures of misery, it owes, no doubt, something to the 
piquant personalities which have to this day not 
entirely lost their rehsh. Notwithstanding this, it 
by no means displays the whole of its author's in- 
tellectual power, and so very various are the merits 
of the different portions of his epic, that one who 
has not read the whole may be truly said not to 
have read Dante. The poet has borrowed the hints 
for his punishments partly from ancient mythology, 
partly from the metaphorical denunciations of Scrip- 
ture, but principally from his own inexliaustible fan- 
cy ; and he has adapted them to the specific crimes 
with a truly frightful ingenuity. We could wish that 
he had made more use of the mind as a means of 
torture, and thus given a finer moral colouring to 
the picture. This defect is particularly conspicuous 
in his portraiture of Satan, who, far different from 
that spirit whose form had not yet lost all her origi- 
nal brightness, is depicted in the gross and super- 
stitious terrors of a childish imagination. This de- 
cidedly bad taste must be imputed to the rudeness 
of the age in which Dante lived. The progress of 
refinement is shown in Tasso's subsequent portrait 
of this same personage, who, " towering like Calpe 
or huge Atlas," is sustained by that unconquerable 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 489 

temper which gives hfe to the yet more spirituahzed 
conceptions of Mikon. The fauks of Dante were 
those of his age ; but in his elevated conceptions, in 
the wild and desolating gloom which he has thrown 
around the city of the dead, the world saw, for the 
first time, the genius of modern literature fully dis- 
played ; and in his ripe and vigorous versification, it 
beheld also, for the first time, the poetical capacities 
of a modern idiom.^ 

The Purgatory rehes for its interest on no strong 
emotion, but on a contemplative moral tone, and on 
such luxuriant descriptions of nature as bring it much 
nearer to the style of English poetry than any other 
part of the work. It is on the Paradise, however, 
that Dante has lavished all the stores of his fancy. 
Yet he has not succeeded in his attempt to exhibit 
there a regular gradation of happiness; for happi- 
ness cannot, like pain, be measured by any scale of 
physical sensations. Neither is he always success- 
ful in the notions which he has conveyed of the oc- 
cupations of the blessed. There was no source 
whence he could derive this knowledge. The 
Scriptures present no determinate idea of such oc- 
cupations, and the mythology of the ancients had so 
little that was consolatory in it, even to themselves, 
that the shade of AchiUes is made to say, in the 
Odyssey, that "he had rather be the slave of the 

* Dante anticipated the final triumph of the Italian with a generous 
confidence, not shared by the more timid scholars of his own or the suc- 
ceeding age. See his eloquent apology for it in his Convito, especially 
p. 81, 82, torn, iv., ed. 1758. See, also, Purg., can. xxiv. 

Q. Q Q 



490 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

meanest living man than rule as a sovereign among 
the dead." 

Dante wisely placed the moral somxes of happi- 
ness in the exercises of the mind. The most agree- 
able of these to himself, though, perhaps, to few of 
his readers, was metaphysical polemics. He had, 
unfortunately, in his youth gained a prize for suc- 
cessful disputation at the schools, and in every page 
of these gladiatorial exhibitions we discern the dis- 
ciple of Scotus and Aquinas. His materiel is made 
up of light, music, and motion. These he has ar- 
ranged in every possible variety of combination. We 
are borne along from one magnificent /c^6 to anoth- 
er, and, as we rise in the scale of being, the motion 
of the celestial dance increases in velocity, the light 
shines with redoubled brilliancy, and the music is of 
a more ravishing sweetness, until all is confounded 
in the intolerable splendours of the Deity. 

Dante has failed in his attempt to personify the 
Deity. Who, indeed, has not \ No such person- 
ification can be effected without the aid of illustra- 
tion from physical objects, and how degrading are 
these to our conceptions of Omnipotence I The re- 
peated failures of the Italians who have attempted 
this in the arts of design are still more conspicuous. 
Even the genius of Raphael has only furnished an- 
other proof of the impotence of his art. The ad- 
vancement of taste may be again seen in Tasso's 
representation of the Supreme Being by his attri- 
butes,* and, with similar discretion, Milton, like the 

* Ger. Lib., cix., s. 56. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 491 

Grecian artist who drew a mantle over the counte- 
nance which he could not trust himself to paint, 
whenever he has introduced the Deity, has veiled his 
glories in a cloud. 

The characters and conditions of Dante and 
Milton were too analogous not to have often invited 
the parallel. Both took an active part in the revo- 
lutions of their age ; both lived to see the extinc- 
tion of their own hopes and the ruin of their party ; 
and it was the fate of both to compose their immor- 
tal poems in poverty and disgrace. These circum- 
stances, however, produced different effects on their 
minds. Milton, in solitude and darkness, from the 
cheerful ways of men cut off, was obhged to seek 
inwardly that celestial light, which, as he pathetical- 
ly laments, was denied to him from without. Hence 
his poem breathes a spirit of lofty contemplation, 
which is never disturbed by the impurities that dis- 
figure the page of Dante. The latter poet, an exile 
in a foreign land, condemned to eat the bread of de- 
pendance from the hands of his ancient enemies, 
felt the iron enter more deeply into his soul, and, in 
the spirit of his age, has too often made his verses 
the vehicle of his vindictive scorn. Both stood forth 
the sturdy champions of freedom in every form, 
above all, of intellectual freedom. The same spirit 
which animates the controversial writings of Milton 
glows with yet fiercer heat in every page of the Di- 
vine Comedy. How does its author denounce the 
abuses, the crying abuses of the Church, its hypoc- 
risies, and manifold perversions of Scripture ! How 



492 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

boldly does he declare his determination to proclaim 
the truth, that he may live in the memory of the just 
hereafter ! His Ghibelline connexions were indeed 
unfavourable to these principles ; but these connex- 
ions were the result of necessity, not of choice. His 
hardy spirit had been nursed in the last ages of the 
Republic ; and it may be truly said of him that he 
became a Ghibelline in the hope of again becoming 
a Florentine. The love of his native soil, as with 
most exiles, was a vital principle with him. How 
pathetically does he recall those good old times 
when the sons of Florence were sure to find a 
grave within her walls ! Even the bitterness of his 
heart against her, which breaks forth in the very 
courts of heaven, proves, paradoxical as it may ap- 
pear, the tenacity of his affection. It might not be 
easy to rouse the patriotism of a modern Italian even 
into this symptom of vitality. 

The genius of both was of the severest kind. For 
this reason, any display of their sensibility, like the 
light breaking through a dark cloud, affects us the 
more by contrast. Such are the sweet pictures of 
domestic bliss in Paradise Lost, and the tender tale 
of Francesca di Rimini in the Inferno. Both are 
sublime in the highest signification of the term ; but 
Milton is an ideal poet, and delights in generahza- 
tion, while Dante is the most literal of artists, and 
paints everything in detail. He refuses no imagery, 
however mean, that can illustrate his subject. This 
is too notorious to require exemplification. He is, 
moreover, eminently distinguished by the power of 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 493 

depicting his thought by a single vigorous touch, a 
manner well known in Italy under the name of 
Dantesque. It would not be easy for such a verse 
as the following, without sacrifice of idiom, to be 
condensed within the same compass in our language : 

" Con viso, che tacendo dicea, taci." 

It would be interesting to trace the similarity of 
tastes in these great minds, as exhibited in their 
pleasures equally with their serious pursuits ; in their 
exquisite sensibihty to music ; in their early fond- 
ness for those ancient romances which they have so 
often celebrated both in prose and verse ; but our 
limits will not allow us to pursue the subject farther. 

Dante's epic was greeted by his countrymen in 
that rude age with the general enthusiasm with 
which they have ever welcomed the works of genius. 
A chair was instituted at Florence for the exposition 
of the Divine Comedy, and Boccaccio was the first 
w^ho filled it. The bust of its author was crowned 
with laurels ; his daughter was maintained at the 
public expense ; and the fickle Florentines vainly 
soHcited from Ravenna the ashes of their poet, whom 
they had so bitterly persecuted when living. 

Notwithstanding all this, the father of Itahan verse 
has had a much less sensible influence on the taste 
of his countrymen than either of the illustrious tri- 
umvirate of the fourteenth century. His bold, mas- 
culine diction and his concentrated thought were 
ill suited to the effeminacy of his nation. One or 
two clumsy imitators of him appeared in his own 
age ; and in ours a school has been formed, profess- 



1 



494 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ing to be modelled on the severe principles of the 
trecentisti ; but no one has jet arisen to bend the 
bow of Ulysses. 

Several poets wrote in the Tuscan or Itahan dia- 
lect at the close of the thirteenth century with tol- 
erable purity ; but their amorous effusions would, 
probably, hke those in the Provencal, have rapidly 
passed into oblivion, had the language not been con- 
secrated by some established work of genius hke the 
Divina Commedia. It was fortunate that its author 
selected a subject which enabled him to exhibit the 
peculiar tendency of Christianity and of modern in- 
stitutions, and to demonstrate their immense superi- 
ority for poetical purposes over those of antiquity. 
It opened a cheering prospect to those who doubted 
the capacities of a modern idiom ; and, after ages of 
barbarism, it was welcomed as the sign that the wa- 
ters had at length passed fi'om the face of the earth. 

We have been detained long upon Dante, though 
somewhat contrary to our intention of discussing 
classes rather than individuals, from the circumstance 
that he constitutes in himself, if we may so say, an 
entire and independent class. We shall now pro- 
ceed, as concisely as possible, to touch upon some 
of the leading peculiarities in the lyrical poetry of 
the ItaUans, which forms with them a very important 
branch of letters. 

Lyrical poetry is more immediately the offspring 
of imagination, or of deep feeling, than any other 
kind of verse, and there can be little chance of 
reaching to high excellence in it among a nation 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 495 

whose character is defective in these quahties. The 
Itahans are, undoubtedly, the most proUfic in this 
department, as the French are the least so, of any 
people in Europe. Nothing can be more mechan- 
ical than a French ode. Reason, wit, pedantry, 
anything but inspiration, find their way into it ; and 
when the poet is in extremity, like the countryman 
in the fable, he calls upon the pagan gods of anti- 
quity to help him out. The best ode in the lan- 
guage, according to La Harpe, is that of J. B. Rous- 
seau on the Count de Luc, in which Phoebus, or 
the Fates, Pluto, Ceres, or Cybele, figure in every 
stanza. There is little of the genuine impetus sacer 
in all this. Lyrical compositions, the expression of 
natural sensibility, are generally most abundant in 
the earlier periods of a nation's literature. Such 
are the beautiful collections of rural minstrelsy in 
our own tongue, and the fine old ballads and songs 
in the Castihan; which last have had the advan- 
tage over ours of being imitated down to a late day 
by their most polished writers. But Italy is the only 
country in which lyrical composition, from the first, 
instead of assuming a plebeian garb, has received all 
the perfection of literary finish, and which, amid ev- 
ery vicissitude of taste, has been cultivated by the 
most pohshed writers of the age. 

One cause of this is to be found in the circum- 
stances and pecuhar character of the father of Ital- 
ian song. The life of Petrarch furnishes the most 
brilliant example of the triumph of letters in a coun- 
try where hterary celebrity has been often the path 



496 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

to political consequence. Princes and pontiffs, cities 
and universities, vied with each other in lavishing 
honours upon him. His tour through Italy was a 
sort of royal progress, the inhabitants of the cities 
thronging out to meet him, and providing a residence 
for him at the pubhc expense. 

The two most enlightened capitals in Europe 
contended with each other for the honour of his po- 
etical coronation. His influence was soHcited in 
the principal negotiations of the Italian States, and 
he enjoyed, at the same time, the confidence of the 
ferocious Visconti and the accomplished Robert of 
Naples. His immense correspondence connected 
him with the principal characters, both literary and 
political, throughout Europe, and his personal biog- 
raphy may be said to constitute the history of his age. 

It must be confessed that the heart of Petrarch 
was not insensible to this universal homage, and 
that his writings occasionally betray the vanity and 
caprice which indicate the spoiled child of fortune ; 
but, with this moderate alloy of humanity, his gen- 
eral deportment exhibits a purity of principle and a 
generous elevation of sentiment far above the de- 
generate politics of his time. He was, indeed, the 
first in an age of servility, as Dante had been the 
last in an age of freedom. If he was intimate with 
some of the petty tyrants of Lombardy, he never 
prostituted his genius to the vindication of their 
vices. His pohtical negotiations were conducted 
with the most generous and extended views for the 
weal of all Italy. How independently did he re- 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 497 

monstrate with Dandolo on his war with the Geno- 
ese ! How did he Hft his voice against the lawless 
banditti who, as foreign mercenaries, ravaged the 
fair plains of Lombardy ! How boldly, to a degree 
which makes it difficult to account for his personal 
safety, did he thunder his invectives against the 
western Babylon ! 

Even his failings were those of a generous nature. 
Dwelling much of his time at a distance from his 
native land, he considered himself rather as a citizen 
of Italy than of any particular district of it. He 
contemplated her with the eye of an ancient Ro- 
man, and wished to see the Imperial City once more 
resume her supremacy among the nations. This 
led him for a moment to give in to the brilliant illu- 
sion of liberty which Rienzi awakened. " Who 
would not," he says, appealing to the Romans, *' rath- 
er die a freeman than live a slave ?"* But when 
he saw that he had been deceived, he did not at- 
tempt to conceal his indignation, and, in an anima- 
ted expostulation with the tribune, he admonishes 
him that he is the minister, not the master of the 
Republic, and that treachery to one's country is a 
crime which nothing can expiate.f 

As he wandered amid the ruins of Rome, he con- 
templated with horror the violation of her venerable 
edifices, and he called upon the pontiffs to return to 
the protection of their " widowed metropoUs." He 
was, above all, solicitous for the recovery of the in- 

* Epist. ad Nic. Laurentii. — Opera, p. 535. 
t Famil. Epist., lib. vii., ep. 7, p. 677, Basil ed. 

R R R 



498 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tellectual treasures of antiquity, sparing no expense 
or personal fatigue in this cause. Many of the 
mouldering manuscripts he restored or copied with 
his own hand ; and his beautiful transcript of the 
epistles of Cicero is still to be seen in the Lam*en- 
tian Library at Florence. 

The influence of his example is visible in the gen- 
erous emulation for letters kindled throughout Italy, 
and in the purer principles of taste which directed 
the studies of the schools.* His extensive corre- 
spondence^ diflused to the remotest corners of Eu- 
rope the sacred flame which glowed so brightly in 
his own bosom ; and it may be truly said that he 
possessed an intellectual empire such as was never 
before enjoyed, and probably never can be again, in 
the comparatively high state of civilization to which 
the world is arrived. 

It is not, however, the antiquarian researches of 
Petrarch, nor those elaborate Latin compositions, 
which secured to him the laurel wreath of poetry in 
the capitol, that have kept his memory still green in 
the hearts of his countrymen, but those humbler ef- 
fusions in his own language, which he did not even 
condescend to mention in his Letter to Posterity 
and which he freely gave away as alms to ballad 
singers. It was auspicious for Italian literature that 

* In Florence, for example, with a population which Villani, at the 
middle of the fourteenth century, reckons at 90,000 souls, there were 
from eight to ten thousand children who received a liberal education 
(Istor. Fiorent., Hb. xi., cap. 93), at a time when the higher classes in 
the rest of Europe were often uninstructed in the elementary principles 
of knowledge. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 499 

a poet like Dante should have been followed by one 
of so flexible a character as Petrarch. It was beauty 
succeeding vigour. The language to which Dante 
had given all its compactness and energy was far 
from having reached the full harmony of numbers 
of which it was capable. He had, moreover, occa- 
sionally distorted it into such Latinized inversions, 
uncouth phrases, Hebraisms and Grecisms, as were 
foreign to the genius of the tongue. These blem- 
ishes, of so little account in Dante's extensive poem, 
would have been fatal to the lyrical pieces of Pe- 
trarch, which, like miniatures, from their minuteness, 
demand the highest finish of detail. The pains 
which the latter poet bestowed on the correction of 
his verses are almost inconceivable. Some of them 
would appear, from the memoranda which he has 
left, to have been submitted to the file for weeks, 
nay, months, before he dismissed them. Nor was 
this fastidiousness of taste frivolous in one who was 
correcting, not for himself, but for posterity, and who, 
in these peculiar graces of style, was creating beau- 
tiful and permanent forms of expression for his coun- 
trymen. His acquaintance with the modern dialects, 
especially the Spanish and the Provenqal, enriched 
his vocabulary with many exotic beauties. His fine 
ear disposed him to refuse all but the most harmo- 
nious combinations of sound. He was accustomed 
to try the melody of his verses by the lute, and, hke 
the fabled Theban, built up his elegant fabric by the 
charms of music. By these means he created a 
style scarcely more antiquated than that of the pres- 



500 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ent day, and which can hardly be said to contain an 
obsolete phrase ; an assertion not to be ventured re- 
specting any author in our language before the days 
of Queen Anne. Indeed, even a foreigner can hard- 
ly open a page of Petrarch without being struck 
with the precocity of a language which, like the 
vegetation of an arctic summer, seems to have ripen- 
ed into full maturity at once. There is nothing 
analogous to this in any other tongue with which 
we are acquainted, unless it be the Greek, which, in 
the poems of Homer, appears to have attained its last 
perfection ; a circumstance which has led Cicero to 
remark, in his Brutus, that " there must, doubtless, 
have existed poets antecedent to Homer, since in- 
vention and perfection can hardly go together." 

The mass of Petrarch's Itahan poetry is, as is 
well known, of an amorous complexion. He was 
naturally of a melancholy temperament, and his un- 
fortunate passion became with him the animating 
principle of being. His compositions in the Latin, 
as well as those in the vulgar tongue, his voluminous 
correspondence, his private memoranda or confes- 
sions, which, from their nature, seem never to have 
been destined for the public eye, all exhibit this pas- 
sion in one shape or another. Yet there have been 
those who have affected to doubt even the existence 
of such a personage as Laura. 

His Sonnets and Canzoni, chronologically arran- 
ged, exhibit pretty fairly the progress of his life and 
love, and, as such, have been judiciously used by the 
Abbe de Sade. The most trivial event seems to 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 501 

have stirred the poetic feeUng within him. We 
find no less than four sonnets indited to his mis- 
tress's gloves, and three to her eyes ; which last, 
^tyl^di, par excellence, the " Three Sisters," are in the 
greatest repute with his countrymen ; a judgment on 
which most Enghsh critics would be at issue with 
them. Notwithstanding the vicious affectation of 
style and the mysticism which occasionally obscure 
these and other pieces of Petrarch, his general tone 
exhibits a moral dignity unknown to the sordid ap- 
petites of the ancients, and an earnestness of passion 
rarely reflected from the cold glitter of the Proven- 
9al. But it is in the verses written after the death 
of his mistress that he confesses the inspiration of 
Christianity, in the deep moral colouring which he 
has given to his descriptions of nature, and in those 
visions of immortal happiness which he contrasts 
with the sad realities of the present life. He dwells 
rather on the melancholy pleasures of retrospection 
than those of hope ; unlike most of the poets of 
Italy, whose warm, sunny skies seem to have scat- 
tered the gloom which hangs over the poetry of the 
North. In this and some other peculiarities, Dante 
and Petrarch appear to have borne greater resem- 
blance to the English than to their own nation. 

Petrarch's career, however brilliant, may serve 
rather as a warning than as a model. The queru- 
lous tone of some of his later writings, the shade of 
real sorrow, which seems to come across even his 
brightest moments, show the utter inefficacy of ge- 
nius and of worldly glory to procure to their pos- 



502 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

sessor a substantial liappiaess. It is melancholy to 
witness the aberrations of mind into which so fine 
a genius was led by unfortunate passion. The ap- 
parition of Laura haunted him by night as well as 
by day, in society and in solitude. He sought to 
divert his mind by travelling, by pohtical or Hterary 
occupation, by reason and religion, but in vain. 
His letters and private confessions show, no less than 
his poetry, how incessantly his imagination was tor- 
tured by doubts, hopes, fears, melancholy presages, 
regrets, and despair. She triumphed over the decay 
of her personal charms, and even over the grave, for 
it was a being of the mind he worshipped. There 
is something affecting in seeing such a mind as Pe- 
trarch's feeding on this unrequited passion, and more 
than twenty years after his mistress's death, and when 
on the verge of the grave himself, depicting her in 
all the bright colouring of youthful fancy, and fol- 
lowing her in anticipation to that Heaven where he 
hopes soon to be united to her. . , 

Petrarch's example, even in his own day, was 
widely infectious. He sarcastically complains of the 
quantities of verses sent to him for correction, from 
the farthest north, from Germany and the British 
Isles, then the Ultima Thule of civilization. The 
pedants of the succeeding age, it is true, wasted their 
efforts in hopeless experiments upon the ancient lan- 
guages, whose chilling influence seems to have en- 
tirely closed the hand of the native minstrel ; and it 
was not until the time of Lorenzo de' Medici, whose 
correct taste led him to prefer the flexible movements 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS, 503 

of a living tongue, that the sweet tones of the Itahan 
lyre were again aw^akened. The excitement, how- 
ever, soon became general, affecting all ranks, from 
the purpled prelate down to the most humble artisan; 
and a collection of the Beauties (as we should call 
them) of this latter description of worthies has been 
gathered into a respectable volume, which Baretti 
assures us, with a good-natured criticism, may be 
compared with the verses of Petrarch. In all these 
the burden of the song is love. Those who did not 
feel could at least affect the tender passion. Lo- 
renzo de' Medici pitched upon a mistress as delib- 
erately as Don Quixote did on his Dulcinea ; and 
Tasso sighed away his soul to a nymph so shadowy 
as sorely to have puzzled his commentators till the 
time of Serassi. 

It would be unavailing to attempt to characterize 
those who have followed in the footsteps of the 
Laureate, or we might dwell on the romantic sweet- 
ness of Lorenzo de' Medici, the purity of Vittoria 
Colonna, the elaborate polish of Bembo, the vivaci- 
ty of Marini, and the eloquence, the Platonic rever- 
ies, and rich colouring of Tasso, whose beauties and 
whose defects so nearly resemble those of his great 
original in this department. But we have no leisure 
to go minutely into the shades of difference between 
the imitators of Petrarch. One may regret that, 
amid their clouds of amorous incense, he can so 
rarely discern the religious or patriotic enthusiasm 
which animates the similar compositions of the 
Spanish poets, and which forms the noblest basis of 



504 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Ijrical poetry at all times. The wrongs of Italy, 
the common battle-field of the banditti of Europe 
for nearly a century, and at the very time when her 
poetic vein flowed most freely, might well have rous- 
ed the indignation of her children. The compara- 
tively few specimens on this theme from Petrarch 
to FiHcaja are justly regarded as the happiest efforts 
of the Italian lyre. 

The seventeenth century, so unfortunate for the 
national literature in all other respects, was marked 
by a bolder deviation from the eternal track of the 
Petrarchists ; a reform, indeed, which may be traced 
back to Casa. Among these innovators, Chiabrera, 
whom Tiraboschi styles both Anacreon and Pindar, 
but who may be content with the former of these 
appellations, and Filicaja, who has found in the 
Christian faith sources of a sublimity that Pindar 
could never reach, are the most conspicuous. Their 
salutary example has not been lost on the modern 
Italian writers. 

Some of the ancients have made a distinct divis- 
ion of lyrical poetry, under the title of melicusJ^ If, 
as it would seem, they mean something of a more 
calm and uniform tenour than the impetuous dithy- 
rambic flow ; something in which symmetry of form 
and melody of versification are chiefly considered ; 
in which, in fine, the efleminate beauties of senti- 
ment are preferred to the more hardy conceptions 
of fancy, the term may be significant of the great 
mass of Itahan lyrics. But we fear that we have 

* Ausonius, Edyl. IV., 54. — Cicero, De Opt. Gen. Oratorum, I. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 505 

insisted too far on their defects. Our criticism has 
been formed rather on the average than on the high- 
est specimens of the art. In this way the very lux- 
uriance of the soil is a disadvantage to it. The 
sins of exuberance, how^ever, are much more corri- 
gible than those of sterility, which fall upon this de- 
partment of poetry in almost every other nation. 
We must remember, too, that no people has exhib- 
ited the passion of love under such a variety of 
beautiful aspects, and that, after all, although the 
amount be comparatively small, no other modern na- 
tion can probably produce so many examples of the 
very highest lyrical inspiration. 

But it is time that we should return to the Ro- 
mantic Epics, the most important, and, perhaps, the 
most prolific branch of the ornamental literature of 
the Italians. They have been distributed into a 
great variety of classes by their own critics. We 
shall confine our remarks to some of their most em- 
inent models, without regard to their classification. 

Those who expect to find in these poems the 
same temper which animates the old Enghsh tales 
of chivalry, will be disappointed. A much more 
correct notion of their manner may be formed from 
Mr. Elhs's Bernesque (if we may be allowed a sig- 
nificant term) recapitulations of these latter. In 
short, they are the marvels of an heroic age, told 
with the fine incredulous air of a pohte one. It is 
this contrast of the dignity of the matter with the fa- 
miharity of the manner of narration that has occa- 
sioned among their countrymen so many animated 

Sss 



506 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

disputes respecting the serious or satirical intentions 
of Pulci, Ariosto, Berni, and the rest. 

The ItaUans, akhough they have brought tales of 
chivalry to higher perfection than any other people 
in the world, are, of all others, in their character 
the most anti-chivalrous. Their early Republican 
histitutions, which brought all classes nearly to the 
same level, were obviously unfavourable to the spirit 
of chivalry. Commerce became the road to prefer- 
ment. Wealth was their pedigree, and their patent 
of nobihty. The magnificent Medici were bankers 
and merchants ; and the ancient aristocracy of Ven- 
ice employed their capital in traffic until, an advan- 
ced period of the Republic. Courage, so essential 
in the character of a knight, was of little account in 
the busy communities of Italy. Like Carthage of 
old, they trusted their defence to mercenaries, first 
foreign, and afterward native, but who in every in- 
stance fought for hire, not honour, selling themselves, 
and often their employers, to the highest bidder; and 
who, cased in impenetrable mail, fought with so lit- 
tle personal hazard, that Machiavelh has related 
more than one infamous encounter in which the 
only lives lost were from suffocation under their 
ponderous panoplies. So low had the miUtary rep- 
utation of the ItaUans declined, that in the war of 
the Neapolitan succession in 1502, it was thought 
necessary for thirteen of their body to vindicate the 
national character from the imputation of coward- 
ice by solemn defiance and battle against an equal 
number of French knights, in presence of the hos- 
tile armies. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 507 

Hence other arts came to be studied than that ot 
war — the arts of diplomacy and intrigue. Hence 
Statesmen were formed, but not soldiers. The cam- 
paign was fought in the cabinet instead of the field. 
Every spring of cunning and corruption was es- 
sayed, and an insidious policy came into vogue, in 
which, as the philosopher, w^ho has digested its prin- 
ciples into a system, informs us, " the failure, not the 
atrocity of a deed, was considered disgraceful."* 
The law of honour became different w^ith the Ital- 
ians from what it was with other nations. Conspir- 
acy v^as preferred to open defiance, and assassina- 
tion was a legitimate method of revenge. The State 
of Venice condescended to employ a secret agent 
against the Hfe of Francis Sforza ; and the noblest 
escutcheons in Italy, those of Este and the Medici, 
were stained with the crimes of fratricide and incest. 

In this general moral turpitude, the literature of 
Italy was rapidly rising to its highest perfection. 
There was scarcely a petty state which, in the four- 
teenth, fifteenth, and beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
turies, had not made brilliant advances in elegant 
prose, poetry, or the arts of design. Intellectual cul- 
ture was widely diffused, and men of the highest 
rank devoted themselves with eagerness to the oc- 
cupation of letters ; this, too, at a time when learn- 
ing in other countries was banished to colleges and 
cloisters ; w^ien books were not always essential in 
the education of a gentleman. Du Guesclin, the 
flower of French chivalry in the fourteenth century, 

* Machiavelli, Istor. Fior., 1. vi. 



508 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

could not read a word. Castiglione, in his Corte- 
giano, has given us so pleasing a picture of the rec- 
reations of the little court of Urbino, one of the 
many into which Italy was distributed at the close 
of the fifteenth century, as to suggest an exalted no- 
tion of its taste and cultivated habits ; and Guicci- 
ardini has described, with all the eloquence of re- 
gret, the flourishing condition of his country at the 
same period, ere the storm had descended on her 
beautiful valleys. In all this we see the character- 
istics of a highly polished state of society, but none 
of the hardy virtues of chivalry. 

It was precisely in such a state of society, light, 
hvely, and licentious, possessed of a high relish for 
the beauties of imagination, but without moral dig- 
nity, or even a just moral sense, that the Muse of 
romance first appeared in Italy ; and it was not to 
be expected that she would retain there her majestic 
Castihan port, or the frank, cordial bearing which 
endeared her to our Norman ancestors. In fact, the 
Italian fancy seems to have caught rather the gay, 
gossiping temper oi the fabliaux. The most famil- 
iar and grotesque adventures are mixed in with the 
most serious, and even these last are related in a 
fine tone of ironical pleasantry. Magnificent inven- 
tions are recommended by agreeable illusions of 
style ; but they not unfrequently furnish a flimsy 
drapery for impurity of sentiment. The high devo- 
tion and general moral aspect of our English Faerie 
Queene are not characteristic, with a few eminent 
exceptions, of Itahan tales of chivalry, in which we 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 509 

too often find the best interests of our nature expo- 
sed to all the license of fiivolous banter. Pulci, who 
has furnished an apology for the infamous Pucelle,* 
and Fortiguerra, with their school of imitators, may 
afford abundant examples to the curious in these 
matters. 

The first successful models of the romantic epic 
were exhibited at the table of Lorenzo de' Medici ; 
that remarkable man, who, as Machiavelli says of 
him, " seemed to unite in his person two distinct na- 
tures" — who could pass from the severe duties of the 
council-chamber to mingle in the dances of the peo- 
ple, and from the abstractions of his favourite phi- 
losophy to the broad merriment of a convivial table. 
Amid all the elegance of the Medici, however — of 
Lorenzo and Leo X. — there seems to have been a 
lurking appetite for vulgar pleasure, at least if we 
may judge from the coarse, satirical repartee which 
Franco and his friend Pulci poured out upon one 
another for the entertainment of their patron, and 
the still more bald buffoonery which enlightened the 
palace of his pontifical son. 

The Stanze of Politian, however, exhibit no trace 
of this obliquity of taste. This fragment of an epic, 
almost too brief for criticism, like a prelude to some 
beautiful air, seems to have opened the way to those 
delightful creations of the Muse which so rapidly 
followed, and to have contained within itself their 

* See Voltaire's preface to it. Chapelain's prosy poem on the same 
subject, La Pucelle d'Orleans, lives now only in the satire of Boileau. 
It was the hard fate of the Heroine of Orleans to be canonized in a dull 
epic, and damned in a witty one. 



510 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

various elements of beauty : the invention of Boiar- 
do, the picturesque narrative of Ariosto, and Tasso's 
flush of colour. Every, stanza is music to the ear, 
and affords a distinct picture to the eye. Unfortu- 
nately, Politian was soon seduced by the fashion of 
the age from the culture of his native tongue. Prob- 
ably no Italian poet of equal promise was ever sacri- 
ficed to the manes of antiquity. His voluminous 
Latin labours are now forgotten, and this fragment 
of an epic affords almost the only point from which 
he is still contemplated by posterity. 

Pulci's Morgante is the first thorough-bred ro- 
mance of chivalry which the Italians have received 
as text of the tongue. It is fashioned much more 
literally than any of its successors, on Turpin's 
Chronicle, that gross medley of fact and fable, too 
barren for romance, too false for history ; the dung- 
hill from which have shot up, nevertheless, the bright 
flowers of French and Italian fiction. In like man- 
ner as in this, religion, not love, is the principle of 
Pulci's action. The theological talk of his devils 
may remind one of the prosy conference of Roland 
and Ferracute; and, strange to say, he is the only 
one of the eminent Italian poets who has adopted 
from the chronicle the celebrated rout at Ronces- 
valles. In his concluding cantos, which those who 
have censured him as a purely satirical or burlesque 
poet can have hardly reached, Pulci, throwing off 
the vulgar trammels which seem to have oppressed 
his genius, rises into the noblest conceptions of po- 
etry, and describes the tragical catastrophe with all 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 511 

the eloquence of pathos and moral grandeur. Had 
he written often thus, the Morgante would now be 
resorted to bj native purists, not merely as the well 
of Tuscan undefiled, but as the genuine fount of epic 
inspiration. 

From the rank and mihtarj profession of Boiardo, 
it might be expected that his poem, the Orlando In- 
namorato, would display more of the lofty tone of 
chivalry than is usual with his countrymen ; but, 
with some exceptions, the portrait of Ruggiero, for 
example, it will be difficult to discern this. He, 
however, excels them all in a certain force of char- 
acterizing, and in an inexhaustible fertility of inven- 
tion. His dramatis personcie, continued by Ariosto, 
might afford an excellent subject for a parallel, which 
we have not room to discuss. In general, he may 
be said to sculpture where Ariosto paints. His he- 
roes assume a fiercer and more indomitable aspect, 
and his Amazonian females a more glaring and less 
fastidious coquetry. But it is in the regions of pure 
fancy that his muse dehghts to sport, where, instead 
of the cold conceptions of a Northern brain, which 
make up the machinery of Pulci, we are introduced 
to the delicate fairies of the East, to gardens bloom- 
ing in the midst of the desert, to palaces of crystal, 
winged steeds, enchanted armour, and all the gay 
fabric of Oriental mythology. It has been the sin- 
gular fate of Boiardo to have had his story continued 
and excelled by one poet, and his style reformed by 
another, until his own original work, and even his 
name, have passed into comparative obUvion. Ber- 



512 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Ill's rifacimento is perhaps the most remarkable in- 
stance of the triumph of style on record. Every 
stanza reflects the sense of the original ; yet such is 
the fascination of his diction, compared with the 
provincial barbarism of his predecessor, as to remind 
one of those mutations in romance where some old 
and withered hag is suddenly transformed into a 
blooming fairy. It may be doubted whether this 
could have succeeded so completely in a language 
where the beauties of style are less appreciated. 
Dry den has made a similar attempt in the Canter- 
bury Tales; but who does not prefer the racy, ro- 
mantic sweetness of Chaucer ? 

The Orlando Furioso, from its superior literary 
execution, as well as from its union of all the pecu- 
liarities of Italian tales of chivalry, may be taken as 
the representative of the whole species. Some of 
the national critics have condemned, and some have 
endeavoured to justify these peculiarities of the ro- 
mantic epopee ; its complicated narrative and pro- 
voking interruptions, its transitions from the gravest 
to the most famihar topics, its lawless extravagance 
of fiction, and other deviations from the statutes of 
antiquity — but very few have attempted to explain 
them on just and philosophical principles. The ro- 
mantic eccentricities of the Italian poets are not to 
be imputed either to inattention or ignorance. Most 
of them were accomplished scholars, and went to 
their work with all the forecast of consummate art- 
ists. Boiardo was so well versed in the ancient 
tongues as to have made accurate translations of 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 513 

Herodotus and Apuleius. Ariosto was such an ele- 
gant Latinist, that even the classic Bembo did not 
disdain to learn from him the mysteries of Horace. 
He consulted his friends over and over again on the 
disposition of his fable, assigning to them the most 
sufficient reasons for its complicated texture. In 
like manner, Tasso shows, in his Poetical Discour- 
ses, how deeply he had revolved the principles of 
his art, and his Letters prove his dexterity in the 
application of these principles to his own composi- 
tions. These illustrious minds understood well the 
difference between copying the ancients and copy- 
ing nature. They knew that to write by the rules 
of the former is not to write like them ; that the ge- 
nius of our institutions requires new and peculiar 
forms of expression ; that nothing is more fantastic 
than a modern antique ; and they wisely left the 
attempt and the failure to such spiritless pedants as 
Trissino. 

The difference subsisting between the ancients 
and moderns, in the constitution of society, amply 
justifies the different principles on which they have 
proceeded in their works of imagination. Religion, 
love, honour — what different ideas are conveyed by 
these terms in these different periods of history !* 
The love of country was the pervading feeling 

How feeble, as an operative principle, must religion have been among 
a people v^ho openly avowed it to be the creation of their own poets. 
<' Homer and Hesiod," says Herodotus, " created the theogony of the 
Greeks, assigning to the gods their various titles, characters, and forms." 
— Herod., ii., 63. Religion, it is well known, was a principal basis of 
modern chivalry. 

T TT 



514 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

which, in the ancient Greek or Roman, seems to 
have absorbed every other, and to have obhterated, 
as it were, the moral idiosyncrasy of the individual, 
while with the moderns it is the individual who 
stands forward in principal rehef His loves, his 
private feuds and personal adventures, form the ob- 
ject almost of exclusive attention. Hence, in the 
classical fable, strict unity of action and concentra- 
tion of interest are demanded, while in the roman- 
tic, the object is best attained by variety of action 
and diversity of interest, and the threads of personal 
adventure separately conducted, and perpetually in- 
tersecting each other, make up the comphcated tex- 
ture of the fable. Hence it becomes so exceedingly 
difficult to discern who is the real hero, and what 
the main action, in such poems as the Innamorato 
and Furioso. Hence, too, the episode, the accident, 
if we may so say, of the classical epic, becomes the 
essence of the romantic. On this explication, Tas- 
so's delightful excursions, his adventures of Sophro- 
nia and Erminia, so often condemned as excrescen- 
ces, may be admired as perfectly legitimate beauties. 
The poems of Homer were intended as historical 
compositions. They were revered and quoted as 
such by the most circumspect of the national wri- 
ters, as Thucydides and Strabo, for example. The 
romantic poets, on the other hand, seem to have in- 
tended nothing beyond a mere delassement of the 
imagination. The old Norman epics, it is true, ex- 
hibit a wonderful coincidence in their delineations 
of manners with the contemporary chronicles. But 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 515 

this is not the spirit of ItaUan romance, which has 
rarely had any higher ostensible aim than that of 
pm-e amusement. 

" Scritta cosi come la penna getta, 
Per fuggir I'ozio, e non per cercar gloria," 

and which was right, therefore, in seeking its mate- 
rials in the wildest extravagances of fiction, the mag- 
nanime menzogne of chivalry, and the brilliant chi- 
meras of the East. 

The immortal epics of Ariosto and Tasso are too 
generally known to require from us any particular 
analysis. Some hght, however, may be reflected on 
these poets from a contrast of their peculiarities. 
The period in which Tasso wrote was one of high 
rehgious fermentation. The Turks, who had so 
long overawed Europe, had recently been discom- 
fited in the memorable sea-fight of Lepanto, and the 
kindling enthusiasm of the nations seemed to threat- 
en for a moment to revive the foUies of the Crusades. 
Tasso's character was of a kind to be peculiarly 
sensible to these influences. His soul was penetra- 
ted with religious fervour, to which, as Serassi has 
shown, more than to any cause of mysterious pas- 
sion, are to be imputed his occasional mental aber- 
rations. He was distinguished, moreover, by his 
chivalrous personal valour, put to the test in more 
than one hazardous encounter ; and he was reckon- 
ed the most expert swordsman of his time. Tasso's 
peculiarities of character were singularly suited to 
his subject. He has availed himself of this to the 
full, in exhibiting the resources and triumphs of 



616 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Christian chivalry. The intellectual rather than the 
physical attributes of his supernatural agents, his 
solemn meditations on the fragility of earthly glory, 
and the noble ardour with which he leads us to as- 
pire after an imperishable crown, give to his epic a 
moral grandeur which no preceding poet had ever 
reached. It has been objected to him, however, that 
he preferred the intervention of subordinate agents 
to that of the Deity ; but the God of the Christians 
cannot be introduced hke those of pagan mythology. 
They espoused the opposite sides of the contest ; 
but, wherever He appears, the balance is no longer 
suspended, and the poetical interest is consequently 
destroyed. 

" Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni." 

This might be sublime with the ancients, but would 
be blasphemous and absurd with the moderns, and 
Tasso judged wisely in availing himself of inferior 
and intermediate ministers. 
Ariosto's various subject, 

" Le donne, i cavalier', rarme, gli draori," 

was equally well suited with Tasso' s to his own va- 
rious and flexible genius. It did not, indeed, admit 
of the same moral elevation, in which he was him- 
self perhaps deficient, but it embraced within its 
range every variety of human passion and portrait- 
ure. Tasso was of a solitary, as Ariosto was of a 
social temper. He had no acquaintance with affairs, 
and Gravina accuses him of drawing his knowledge 
from books instead of men. He turned his thoughts 
inward, and matured them by deep and serious med- 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 517 

itation. He had none of the volatile talents of his 
rival, v^ho seems to have parted with his brilliant 
fancies as readily as the tree gives up its leaves in 
autumn. Ariosto was a man of the world, and in 
his philosophy may be styled an Epicurean. His 
satires show a familiarity with the practical con- 
cerns of life, and a deep insight into the characters 
of men. His conceptions, however, were of the 
earth ; and his pure style, which may be compared 
with Alcina's transparent drapery, too often reveals 
to us the grossest impurity of thought. 

The muse of Tasso was of a heavenly nature, and 
nourished herself with celestial visions and ideal 
forms of beauty. He was a disciple of Plato, and 
hence the source of his general elevation of thought, 
and too often of his mystical abstraction. The 
healthful bloom of his language imparts an inexpres- 
sible charm to the purity of his sentiments, and it is 
truly astonishing that so chaste and dignified a com- 
position should have been produced in an age and 
court so corrupt. 

Both of these great artists elaborated their style 
with the utmost care, but with totally different re- 
sults. This frequently gave to Tasso's verse the fin- 
ish of a lyrical, or, rather, of a musical composition ; 
for many of his stanzas have less resemblance to the 
magnificent rhythm of Petrarch than to the melodi- 
ous monotony of Metastasio. This must be con- 
sidered a violation of the true epic style. It is sin- 
gular that Tasso himself, in one of his poetical crit- 
icisms, should have objected this very defect to his 



518 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

rival.* The elaboration of Ariosto, on the other 
hand, resulted in that exquisite negligence, or, rather, 
artlessness of expression, so easy in appearance, but 
so difficult in reaUty to be imitated : 

" Facil' versi che costan tanta pena." 

The Jerusalem Delivered is placed, by the nice 
discrimination of the Italian critics, at the head of 
their heroic epics. In its essence, however, it is 
strictly romantic, though in its form it is accommo- 
dated to the general proportions of the antique. In 
Ariosto's complicated fable it is difficult to discern 
either a leading hero or a predominant action. Sis- 
mondi applauds Ginguene for having discovered this 
hero in Ruggiero. But both these writers might 
have found this discovery, where it was revealed 
more than two centuries ago, in Tasso's own Dis- 
courses.f We doubt, however, its accuracy, and 
cannot but think that the prominent part assigned 
to Orlando, from whom the poem derives its name, 
manifests a different intention in the author. 

The stately and imposing beauties of Tasso's epic 
have rendered it generally the most acceptable to 
foreigners, while the volatile graces of Ariosto have 
made him most popular with his own nation. Both 
poets have had the rare felicity, not only of obtain- 
ing the applause of the learned, but of circulating 
among the humblest classes of their countrymen. 
Fragments of the Furioso are still recited by the laz- 
zaroni of Naples, as those of the Jerusalem once 
were by the gondoliers of Venice, where this beau- 

* Discorsi Poetici, iii. t Ibid., ii. 



POETEY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 519 

tiful epic, broken up into ballads, might be heard for 
miles along the canals on a tranquil summer even- 
ing. Had Boileau, who so bitterly sneers at the 
clinquant of Tasso, " heard these musical contests," 
says Voltaire, " he would have had nothing to say." 
It is worthy of remark, that these two celebrated 
poems, together with the Aminta, the Pastor Fido, 
and the Secchia Rapita, were all produced within 
the brief compass of a century, in the petty princi- 
pality of the house of Este, which thus seemed to 
indemnify itself for its scanty territory by its ample 
acquisitions in the intellectual world. 

The mass of epical imitations in Italy, both of 
Ariosto and Tasso, especially the former, is perfect- 
ly overwhelming. Nor is it easy to understand the 
patience with which the Italians have resigned them- 
selves to these interminable poems of seventy, eigh- 
ty, or even ninety thousand verses each. Many of 
them, it must be admitted, are the work of men of 
real genius, and, in a literature less fruitful in epic 
excellence, would have given a wide celebrity to 
their authors ; and the amount of others of less note, 
in a department so rarely attempted in other coun- 
tries, shows in the nation at large a wonderful fe- 
cundity of fancy. 

The Italians, desirous of combining as many at- 
tractions as possible, and extremely sensible to har- 
mony, have not, as has been the case in France and 
England, divested their romances of the music of 
verse. They have rarely adopted a national subject 
for their story, but have condescended to borrow 



520 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

those of the old Norman minstrels; and in conform- 
ity with the characteristic temperament of the na- 
tion, they have almost always preferred the mercu- 
rial temper of the court of Charlemagne to the more 
sober complexion of the Round Table."^ 

With a few exceptions, the romantic poets, since 
the time of Ariosto, appear to have gained as little 
in elevation of sentiment as in national feeling. The 
nice classification of their critics seems to relate 
only to their varieties of comic character, and as we 
descend to a later period, the fine, equivocal raillery 
of the older romances degenerates into a broad and 
undisguised burlesque. In the latter class, the Ric- 
ciardetto of Fortiguerra is a jest rather than a sa- 
tire upon tales of chivalry. The singular union 
which this work exhibits of elegance of style and 
homeliness of subject, may have furnished, especial- 
ly in its introduction, the model of that species of 
poetry which Lord Byron has familiarized us with 
in Don Juan, where the contrast of sentiment and 
satire, of vivid passion and chill misanthropy, of im- 
ages of beauty and splenetic sarcasm, may remind 
one of the whimsical combinations in Alpine scenery, 
where the strawberry blooms on the verge of a snow- 
wreath. 

The ItaUans claim to have given the first models 
of mock heroic poetry in modern times. The Sec- 
chia Rapita of Tassoni has the merit of a graceful 
versification, exhibiting many exquisite pictures of 

* The French antiquary, Tressan, furnishes an exception to the gen- 
eral criticism of his countrymen, in admitting the superiority of this lat- 
ter class of romances over those of Charlemagne. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 521 

voluptuous repose, and some passages of an imposing 
grandeur. But these accord ill with the vulgar mer- 
riment and general burlesque tone of the piece, 
v^^hich, on the whole, presents a strange medley of 
beauties and blemishes mixed up promiscuously to- 
gether. Twelve cantos of hard fighting and cutting 
of throats are far too serious for a joke. The blood- 
less battle of the books in the Lutrin, or those of 
the pot-valiant heroes of Knickerbocker, are in much 
better keeping. The Italians have no poetry of a 
mezzo carattere like our Rape of the Lock,* where 
a fine atmosphere of irony pervades the piece, and 
gives life to every character in it. They appear to 
delight in that kind of travestie which reduces great 
things into little, but which is of a much less spirit- 
ual nature than that which exalts little things into 
great. Parini's exquisite Giorno, if the satire had 
not rather too sharp an edge, might furnish an ex- 
ception to both these remarks. 

But it is time that we should turn to the Novelle, 
those delightful " tales of pleasantry and love," which 
form one of the most copious departments of the 
national literature. And here we may remark two 
pecuUarities : first, that similar tales in France and 
England fell entirely into neglect after the fifteenth 
century, while in Italy they have been cultivated 
with the most unwearied assiduity from their ear- 
liest appearance to the present hour ; secondly, that 
in both the former countries the fabliaux were almost 
universally exhibited in a poetical dress, while in 

* Pignotti, Stor. del. Toscana, torn, x., p. 132. 

Uuu 



522 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Italy, contrary to the popular taste on all other oc- 
casions, they have been as uniformly exhibited in 
prose. These peculiarities are undoubtedly to be 
imputed to the influence of Boccaccio, whose trans- 
cendent genius gave a permanent popularity to this 
kind of composition, and finally determined the 
forms of elegant prose w^ith his nation. 

The appearance of the Decameron is, in some 
points of view, as remarkable a phenomenon as that 
of the Divine Comedy. It furnishes the only ex- 
ample on record of the almost simultaneous devel- 
opment of prose and poetry in the literature of a 
nation. The earliest prose of any pretended liter- 
ary value in the Greek tongue, the most precocious 
of any of antiquity, must be placed near four centu- 
ries after the poems of Homer. To descend to 
modern times, the Spaniards have a little work, "El 
Conde Lucanor," nearly contemporary with the 
Decameron, written on somewhat of a similar plan, 
but far more didactic in its purport. Its style, though 
marked by a certain freshness and naivete, the healthy 
beauties of an infant dialect, has nothing of a class- 
ical finish ; to which," indeed, Castilian prose, not- 
withstanding its fine old chronicles and romances, 
can make no pretension before the close of the fif- 
teenth century. • In France, a still later period must 
be assigned for this perfection. Dante, it is true, 
speaks of the peculiar suitableness of the French 
language in his day for prose narration, on account 
of its flexibihty and freedom f but Dante had few 

* De Vulg. Eloq., lib. i., cap. x. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 523 

and very inadequate standards of comparison, and 
experience has shown how many ages of purifica- 
tion it was to undergo before it could become the 
vehicle of elegant composition. Pascal's Provincial 
Letters furnish, in the opinion of the national critics, 
the earliest specimen of good prose. It would be 
more difficult to agree upon the author, or the pe- 
riod that arrested the fleeting forms of expression in 
our own language ; but we certainly could not ven- 
ture upon an earlier date than the conclusion of the 
seventeenth century. 

The style of the Decameron exhibits the full ma- 
turity of an Augustan age. The finish of its periods, 
its long, Latinized involutions, but especially its re- 
dundancy and Asiatic luxury of expression, vices 
imputed to Cicero by his own contemporaries, as 
Quintihan informs us, reveal to us the model on 
w^hich Boccaccio diligently formed himself In the 
more elevated parts of his subject he reaches to an 
eloquence not unworthy of the Roman orator him- 
self The introductions to his novels, chiefly de- 
scriptive, are adorned with all the music and the 
colouring of poetry; much too poetic, indeed, for 
the prose of any other tongue. It cannot be doubt- 
ed that this brilHant piece of mechanism has had an 
immense influence on the Itahans, both in seducing 
them into a too exclusive attention to mere beauties 
of style, and in leading them to solicit such beauties 
in graver and less appropriate subjects than those of 
pure invention. 

In the celebrated description of the Plague, how- 



524 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ever, Boccaccio has shown a muscular energy of 
diction quite worthy of the pen of Thucydides. Yet 
there is no satisfactory evidence that he had read 
the similar performance of the Greek historian, and 
the conjecture of Baldelli to that effect is founded 
only on a resemblance of some detached passages, 
which might well occur in treating of a similar dis- 
ease."^ In the delineation of its fearful moral con- 
sequences, Boccaccio has undoubtedly surpassed his 
predecessor. It is singular that of the three cele- 
brated narratives of this distemper, that by the Eng- 
lishman, De Foe, is by far the most circumstantial 
in its details, and yet that he was the only one of 
the three historians who was not an eyewitness to 
what he relates.f The Plague of London happen- 
ed in the year succeeding his birth. 

The Itahan novelists have followed so closely in 
the track of Boccaccio, that we may discuss their 
general attributes w^ithout particular reference to 
him, their beauties and their blemishes varying only 
in degree. They ransacked every quarter for their 
inventions: Eastern legends, '^oimdJi fabliaux, do- 
mestic history, tradition, and vulgar, contemporary 
anecdote. They even helped themselves, plenis 
?na?iihus, to one another's fancies, particularly filch- 
ing from the Decameron, which has for this reason 
been pleasantly compared to a pawnbroker's shop. 
But no exceptions seem to be taken at such plagia- 

* Vita di Boccaccio, lib. ii., s. 2, note. 

t It seems probable, however, from a passage in Boccaccio, cited by 
Bandelli, that he witnessed the plague in some other city of Italy than 
Florence. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 525 

rism, and, as long as the story could be disguised in 
a different dress, they cared little for the credit of 
the invention. These fictions are oftentimes of the 
most grotesque and improbable character, exhibiting 
no great skill in the liaison of events, v^hich are 
strung together with the rude artlessness of a prim- 
itive trouveur, while most promising beginnings are 
frequently brought up by flat and impotent conclu- 
sions. Many of the novelle are made up of mere 
personal anecdote, proverbialisms, and Florentine 
table-talk, the ingredients of an encyclopedia of wit. 
In all this, however, we often find less wit than 
merriment, which shows itself in the most puerile 
practical jokes, played off upon idiots, unfortunate 
pedants, and other imbeciles, with as little taste as 
feeling. 

The novelle wear the usual light and cheerful as- 
pect of ItaUan literature. They seldom aim at a 
serious or didactic purpose. Their tragical scenes, 
though very tragical, are seldom affecting. We rec- 
ollect in them no example of the passion of love 
treated with the depth and tenderness of feeling so 
frequent in the English dramatists and novelists. 
They can make little pretension, indeed, to accu- 
rate delineation of character of any sort. Even 
Boccaccio, who has acquired, in our opinion, a 
somewhat undeserved celebrity in this way, paints 
professions rather than individuals. The brevity of 
the Italian tale, which usually affords space only for 
the exhibition of a catastrophe, is an important ob- 
stacle to a gradual development of character. 



526 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

A remarkable trait in these novelle is the extreme 
boldness with which the reputations of the clergy 
are handled. Their venality, lechery, hypocrisy, 
and abominable impositions are all exposed with a 
reckless independence. The head of the Chmxh 
himself is not spared. It is not easy to account for 
this authorized latitude in a country where so jeal- 
ous a surveillance has been maintained over the free- 
dom of the press in relation to other topics. War- 
ton attempts to explain it, as far as regards the De- 
cameron, by supposing that the ecclesiastics of that 
age had become tainted with the dissoluteness so 
prevalent after the Plague of 1348 ; and Madame de 
Stael suggests that the government winked at this 
license as the jesting of children, who are content to 
obey their masters so they may laugh at them. But 
neither of these solutions will suffice; for the hcense 
of Boccaccio has been assumed more or less by 
nearly every succeeding novelist, and the jests of 
this merry tribe have been converted into the most 
stinging satire on the clergy, in the hands of the gra- 
vest and most powerful writers of the nation, from 
Dante to Monti. 

It may be truly objected to the ItaUan novelists, 
that they have been as little solicitous about purity 
of sentiment as they have been too much so about 
purity of style. The reproach of indecency hes 
heavily upon most of their writings, from the Decam- 
eron to the infamous tales of Casti, which, reeking 
with the corruption of a brothel, have passed into 
several surreptitious editions during the present cen- 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 527 

turj. This indecency is not always a mere excres- 
cence, but deeply ingrained in the body of the piece. 
It is not conveyed in innuendo, or softened under 
the varnish of sentiment, but is exhibited in all the 
nakedness of detail which a debauched imagination 
can divine. Petrarch's encomiastic letter to his 
friend Boccaccio, written at the close of his own life, 
in which he affects to excuse the licentiousness of 
the Decameron from the youth of the author,* al- 
though he was turned of forty when he composed it, 
has been construed into an ample apology for their 
own transgressions by the subsequent school of nov- 
elists. 

It is true that some of the popes, of a more fastid- 
ious conscience, have taken exceptions at the hcense 
of the Decameron, and have placed it on the Index ; 
but an expurgated edition, whose only alteration 
consisted in the substitution of lay names for those 
of the clergy, set all things right again. 

Such adventures as the seduction of a friend's 
wife, or the deceptions practised upon a confiding 
husband, are represented as excellent pieces of wit 
in these fictions — in some of the best of them, even ; 
and often when their authors would be moral, 
they betray, in their confused perceptions of right 
and wrong, the most deplorable destitution of a mor- 
al sense. Grazzini (^7 Lascd), one of the most pop- 
ular of the tribe of the sixteenth century, after invo- 
king, in the most solemn manner, the countenance 
of the Deity upon his labours, and beseeching him 

* Petrarca Op., ed. Basil., p. 540. 



528 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

to inspire his mind with " such thoughts only as may 
redound to his praise and glory," enters immediately, 
in the next page, upon one of the most barefaced 
specimens of "bold bawdry," to make use of the 
plain language of Roger Ascham, that is to be found 
in the whole work. It is not easy to estimate the 
demoralizing influence of writings, many of which, 
being possessed of the beauties of literary finish, are 
elevated into the rank of classics, and thus find their 
way into the most reserved and fastidious libraries. 

The literary execution of these tales is, however, 
by no means equal. In some it is even neglected, 
and in all falls below that of their great original. 
Still, in the larger part the graces of style are sedu- 
lously cultivated, and in many constitute the princi- 
pal merit. Some of their authors, especially the 
more ancient, as Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni, derive 
great repute from their picturesque proverbialisms 
{rihoholi), the racy slang of the Florentine mob; 
pearls of little price with foreigners, but of great es- 
timation with their own countrymen. On these 
qualities, however, as on all those of mere external 
form, a stranger should pronounce with great diffi- 
dence ; but the intellectual and moral character of a 
composition, especially the last, are open to univer- 
sal criticism. The principles of taste may differ in 
different nations ; but, however often obscured by 
education or habit, there can be only one true stand- 
ard of morality. 

We may concede, then, to many of the novelle, 
the merits of a delicate work of art, gracefulness, 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 529 

nay, eloquence of style, agreeable facility of narra- 
tive, pleasantry that sometimes rises into wit, occa- 
sional developments of character, and an inexhaust- 
ible novelty of situation. But we cannot help re- 
gretting that, while so many of the finest wits of the 
nation have amused themselves with these compo- 
sitions, they should not have exhibited virtue in a 
more noble and imposing attitude, or studied a more 
scientific delineation of passion, or a more direct 
moral aim or practical purpose. How rarely do we 
find, unless it be in some few of the last century, the 
didactic or even satirical tone of the English essay- 
ists, who seldom assume the Oriental garb, so fre- 
quent in Italian tales, for any other purpose than 
that of better conveying a prudential lesson. Gold- 
smith and Hawkesworth may furnish us with perti- 
nent examples of this. How rarely do we recognise 
in these novelle the living portraiture of Chaucer, or 
the philosophical point which sharpens the pleasant- 
ry of La Fontaine; both competitors in the same 
walk. Without any higher object than that of pres- 
ent amusement, these productions, like many others 
of their elegant literature, seem to be thrown off in 
the mere gayety of the heart. 

Chaucer, in his peculiarities, represents as faith- 
fully those of the English nation as his rival and 
contemporary, Boccaccio, represents the Italian. In 
a searching anatomy of the human heart, he as far 
excels the latter, as in rhetorical beauty he is sur- 
passed by him. The prologue to his Canterbury 
Tales alone contains a gallery of portraits, such as 
Xxx 



530 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

is not to be found in the whole compass of the De- 
cameron ; his friar, for example, 

" That somewhat lisped from his wantonnesse 
To make his English sweete upon his tonge ;" 

his worthy parson, " glad to teche and glad to lerne ;" 
his man of law, who 

" Though so besy a man as he ther n' as, 
Yet seemed besier than he was ;" 

and his inimitable wag of a host, breaking his jests, 
like FalstafF, indiscriminately upon every one he 
meets. Chaucer was a shrewd observer of the re- 
alities of life. He did not indulge in day-dreams of 
visionary perfection. His little fragment of Sir 
Thopaz is a fine quiz upon the incredihilia of chiv- 
alry. In his conclusion of the story of the patient 
Griselde, instead of adopting the somewhat y^cfe eu- 
logiums of Boccaccio, he good-naturedly jests at the 
ultra perfection of the heroine. Like Shakspeare 
and Scott, his successors and superiors in the school 
of character, he seems to have had too vivid a per- 
ception of the vanities of human life to allow him 
for a moment to give into those extravagances of 
perfection which have sprung from the brain of so 
many fond enthusiasts. 

Chaucer's genius was every way equal to that of 
Boccaccio, yet the direct influence of the one can 
scarcely be discerned beyond his own age, while 
that of the other has reached to the present genera- 
tion. A principal cause of this is the difference of 
their style ; that of the former exhibiting only the 
rude graces of a primitive dialect, while Boccaccio's 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 531 

may be said to have reached the full prime of a cul- 
tivated period. Another cause is discernible in the 
new and more suitable forms w^hich came to be 
adopted for that delineation of character w^hich con- 
stitutes the essence of Chaucer's fictions, viz., those 
of the drama and the extended novel, in both of 
w^hich Italian literature has, until very recently, been 
singularly deficient. Boccaccio made two elaborate 
essays in novel-writing, but his genius seems to have 
been ill adapted to it, and in his strange and prolix 
narrative, which brings upon the stage again the ob- 
solete deities of antiquity, even the natural graces 
of his style desert him. The attempt has scarcely 
been repeated until our day, w^hen the impulse com- 
municated by the English, in romance and historical 
novel-writing, to other nations on the Continent, 
seems to have extended itself to Italy ; and the ex- 
traordinary favour which has been show^n there to 
the first essays in this way, may perhaps lead even- 
tually to more brilliant successes. 

The Spaniards, under no better circumstances 
than the Italians, made, previously to the last-men- 
tioned period, a nearer approach to the genuine 
novel. Cervantes has furnished, amid his carica- 
tures of chivalry, many passages of exquisite pathos 
and pleasantry, and a rich variety of national por- 
traiture. The same, though in a less degree, may 
be affirmed of his shorter tales, Novelas exemplares, 
which, however inferior to those of the Decameron 
in rhetorical elegance, certainly surpass them in their 
practical appUcation. But the pecuHar property of 



532 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the Spaniards is their jncaresco novel, a mere chron- 
icle of the adventures and mischievous pranks of 
young pickpockets and clievaliers d'indmtrie, invent- 
ed, whimsically enough, by a Castihan grandee, one 
of the proudest of his caste, and w^hich, notwithstand- 
ing the glaring contrast it affords to the habitual 
gravity of the nation, has, perhaps from this very 
circumstance, been a great favourite with it ever 
since. 

The French have made other advances in novel- 
writing. They have produced many specimens of 
wit and of showy sentiment, but they seldom afford 
any wide range of observation, or searching views 
of character. The conventional breeding that uni- 
versally prevails in France has levelled all inequal- 
ities of rank, and obliterated, as it were, the moral 
physiognomy of the different classes, which, however 
salutary in other respects, is exceedingly unpropi- 
tious to the purposes of the novelist. Moliere, the 
most popular character-monger of the French, has 
penetrated the superjicies of the most artificial state 
of society. His spirited sketches of fashionable fol- 
ly, though very fine, very Parisian, are not always 
founded on the universal principles of human na- 
ture, and, when founded on these, they are sure to 
be carried more or less into caricature. The French 
have little of the English talent for humour. They 
have buffoonery, a lively wit, and a naivete beyond 
the reach of art — Rabelais, Voltaire, La Fontaine — 
everything but humour. How spiritless and affect- 
ed are the caricatures so frequently stuck up at their 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 533 

shop-windows, and which may be considered as the 
popular expression in this way, compared with those 
of the Enghsh. It is impossible to conceive of a 
French Goldsmith or Fielding, a Hogarth or a Wil- 
kie. They have, indeed, produced a Le Sage, but 
he seems to have confessed the deficiency of his own 
nation by deriving his models exclusively from a 
foreign one. 

On the other hand, the freedom of the political 
and social institutions, both in this country and in 
England, which has encouraged the undisguised ex- 
pansion of intellect and of pecuharities of temper, 
has made them the proper theatre for the student of 
his species. Hence man has been here delineated 
with an accuracy quite unrivalled in any ancient or 
modern nation, and, as the Greeks have surpassed 
every later people in statuary, from their familiarity 
with the visible, naked forms of manly beauty, so 
the English may be said, from an analogous cause, 
to. have excelled all others in moral portraiture. To 
this point their most eminent artists have directed 
their principal attention. We have already noticed 
it in Chaucer. It formed the essence of the drama 
in Elizabeth's time, as it does that of the modern 
novel. Shakspeare and Scott, in their respective 
departments, have undoubtedly carried this art to 
the highest perfection of which it is capable, sacri- 
ficing to it every minor consideration of probability, 
incident, and gradation of plot, which they seem to 
have valued only so far as they might be made sub- 
servient to the main purpose of a clearer exposition 
of character. 



534 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

But it is time to return from the digression into 
which we have been led by a desire of illustrating 
certain peculiarities of Italian literature, which can 
in no way be done so well as by comparing them 
with those of corresponding departments in other 
languages. Such a comparison abundantly shows 
how much deeper and more philosophical have been 
the views proposed by prose fiction in England than 
in Italy. 

We have reserved the Drama for the last, as, un- 
til a very recent period, it has been less prolific in 
eminent models than either of the great divisions of 
Itahan letters. Yet it has been the one most assid- 
uously cultivated from a very early period, and this, 
too, by the ripest scholars and most approved wits. 
The career was opened by such minds as Ariosto 
and Machiavelli, at a time when the theatres in oth- 
er parts of Europe had given birth only to the un- 
seemly abortions of mysteries and moralities. Bou- 
terwek has been led into a strange error in impu- 
ting the low condition of the Italian drama to the 
small number of men, of even moderate abilities, 
who have cultivated it.* A glance at the long mus- 
ter-roll of eminent persons employed upon it, from 
Machiavelli to Monti, will prove the contrary .f The 
unprecedented favour bestowed on the most success- 
ful of the dramatic writers may serve to show, at 
least, the aspirations of the people. The Merope 

* See the conclusion of his History of Spanish Literature. 

t See Allacci's Drammaturgia, passim, and Riccoboni Theatre Ital., 
torn, i., p. 187-208. Allacci's catalogue, as continued down to the mid- 
dle of the eighteenth century, occupies nearly a thousand quarto pages. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 535 

of Maffei, which may be deemed the first dawn of 
improvement in the tragic art, passed through sixty 
editions. Notwithstanding all this, the Italians, in 
comedy, and still more in tragedy, until the late ap- 
parition of Alfieri, remained far below several of the 
other nations of Europe. 

A principal cause of their repeated failures has 
been often referred to the inherent vices of their 
system, which required a blind conformity with the 
supposed rules of Aristotle. Under the cumbrous 
load of antiquity, the freedom and grace of natural 
movement were long impeded. Their first attempts 
were translations, or literal imitations of the Latin 
theatre ; some of these, though objectionable in form, 
contain the true spirit of comedy. Those of Ariosto 
and Machiavelli, in particular, with even greater li- 
centiousness of detail, and a more immoral conclu- 
sion than belong either to Plautus or Terence, fully 
equal, perhaps surpass them, in their spirited and 
whimsical draughts of character. Ariosto is never 
more a satirist than in his comedies; and Machia- 
velli, in his Mandragola, has exposed the hypocri- 
sies of religion with a less glaring caricature than 
Moliere has shown in his Tartufie. The spirit of 
these great masters did not descend to their imme- 
diate successors. Goldoni, however, the Moliere of 
Italy, in his numerous comedies or farces, has suc- 
ceeded in giving a lively, graphic portraiture of local 
manners, with infinite variety and comic power, but 
no great depth of interest. He has seldom risen to 
refined and comprehensive views of society, and his 



536 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

pieces, we may trust, are not to be received as faith- 
fully reflecting the national character, which they 
would make singularly deficient both in virtue and 
the principle of honour. The writers 'who have 
followed in the footsteps of Goldoni, exhibit, for the 
most part, similar defects, with far inferior comic 
talent. Their productions, on the whole, however, 
may be thought to maintain an advantageous com- 
parison with those of any other people in Europe 
during the same period, although some of them, to 
judge from the encomiastic tone of their critics, ap- 
pear to have obtained a wider celebrity with their 
contemporaries than will be probably conceded to 
them by posterity. The comedies of art which Gol- 
doni superseded, and which were, perhaps, more in- 
dicative of the national taste than any other dramat- 
ic performances, can hardly come within the scope 
of literary criticism. 

The Itahan writers would seem not even to have 
agreed upon a suitable measure for comedy, some 
using the common versi sciolti, some the sdruccioli, 
others, again, the martelliani, and many more pre- 
ferring prose.^ Another impediment to their suc- 
cess is the great variety of dialects in Italy, as nu- 
merous as her petty states, which prevents the rec- 
ognition of any one uniform style of famiUar con- 
versation for comedy. The greater part of the 
pieces of Goldoni are written, more or less, in the 

* Professor Salfi affirms prose to be the most suitable, indeed the only 
proper dress for Italian comedy. See his sensible critique on the Italian 
comic drama, prefixed to the late edition of Alberto Nota's Commedie, 
Parigi, 1829. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 537 

local idiom of one of the extremities of Italy ; an 
inconvenience which cannot exist, and which can 
hardly be appreciated in a country where one ac- 
knowledged capital has settled the medium of pohte 
intercourse. 

The progress of the nation in the tragic art, until 
a late period, has been yet more doubtful. Some 
notion may be formed of its low state in the last 
century from the circumstance that, when the play- 
ers were in want of a serious piece, they could find 
none so generally acceptable as an opera of Metas- 
tasio, stripped of its musical accompaniments. The 
appearance of Alfieri at this late season, of a genius 
so. austere, in the midst of the voluptuous. Sybarite 
effeminacy of the period, is a remarkable phenom- 
enon. It was as if the severe Doric proportions of 
a Psestum temple had been suddenly raised up amid 
the airy forms of Palladian architecture. The re- 
served and impenetrable character of this man has 
been perfectly laid open to us in his own autobiog- 
raphy. It was made up of incongruity and paradox. 
To indomitable passions he joined the most frigid 
exterior. With the fiercest aristocratic nature, he 
yet quitted his native state that he might enjoy un- 
molested the sweets of liberty. He published one 
philippic against kings, and another against the peo- 
ple. His theoretic love of freedom was far from be- 
ing warmed by the genuine glow of patriotism. Of 
all his tragedies, he condescended to derive two only 
from Italian history ; and when, in his prefaces, ded- 
ications, or elsewhere, he takes occasion to notice 

Yyy 



538 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

his countrymen, he does it in the bitterness of irony 
and insult. 

When he first set about his tragedies, he could 
compose only in a sort of French and Piedmontese 
patois. He was unacquainted with any written dra- 
matic literature, though he had witnessed the the- 
atrical exhibitions of the principal capitals of Eu- 
rope. He was, therefore, to form himself all fresh 
upon such models as he might prefer. His haughty 
spirit carried him back to the trecentisti, especially 
to Dante, whose stern beauties he sedulously endeav- 
oured to transfuse into his own style. He studied 
Tacitus, moreover, with diligence, and made three 
entire translations of Sallust. He was greatly afraid 
of falling into the cantilena of Metastasio, and sought 
to avoid this by sudden abruptions of language, by 
an eccentric use of the articles and pronouns, by 
dislocating the usual structure of verse, and by dis- 
tributing the emphatic words with exclusive refer- 
ence to the sense."^ 

This unprecedented manner brought upon Alfieri 
a host of critics, and he was compelled, in a subse- 
quent edition, to soften down its most offensive as- 
perities. He imputes to himself as many dififerent 
styles of composition as distinguish the works of 
Raphael, and it is pretty evident that he considers 
the last as near perfection as he could well hope to 
attain. It is, indeed, a noble style : with the occa- 
sional turbulence of a mighty rapid, it has all its ful- 

* See a summary of these peculiarities in Casalbigi's Letter, prefixed 
to the late editions of Alfieri's tragedies. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 539 

ness and magnificent flow ; and it shows how utter- 
ly impossible it is, by any effort of art, to repress the 
natm-al melody of the Tuscan. 

Alfieri effected a still more important revolution 
in the intellectual character of the drama, arousing 
it from the lethargy into which it had fallen, and 
making it the vehicle of generous and heroic senti- 
ment. He forced his pieces sometimes, it is true, 
by violent contrast, but he brought out his characters 
with a fulness of relief, and exhibited a dexterous 
combat of passion, that may not unfrequently remind 
us of Shakspeare. He dismissed all supernumera- 
ries from his plays, and put into action what his 
predecessors had coldly narrated. He dispensed, 
moreover, with the curious coincidences, marvellous 
surprises, and all the hei colpi di scena so familiar in 
the plays of Metastasio. He disdained even the po- 
etical aid of imagery, relying wholly for effect on the 
dignity of his sentiments, and the imposing charac- 
ter of his agents. 

Alfieri has been thought to have made a nearer 
approach to the Greek tragedy than any of the mod- 
erns. He, indeed, disclaims the imitation of any 
foreign model, and he did not learn the Greek till 
late in life ; but the drama of his own nation had 
always been servilely accommodated to 'the rules of 
the ancients, and he himself had rigorously adhered 
to the same code. His severe genius, too, wears 
somewhat of the aspect of that of the father of Gre- 
cian tragedy, with which it has been repeatedly 
compared; but any apparent resemblance in their 



540 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

compositions vanishes on a closer inspection. The 
assassination of Agamemnon, for example, forms the 
subject of a tragedy with both these writers ; but on 
what different principles is it conducted by each ! 
The larger proportion of the play of iEschylus is 
taken up with the melancholy monologues of Cas- 
sandra and the chorus, which, boding the coming 
disasters of the house of Atreus, or mourning over 
the destiny of man, are poured forth in a lofty dith- 
yrambic eloquence, that gives to the whole the air 
of a lyrical rather than a dramatic composition. It 
was this lyrical enthusiasm which, doubtless, led 
Plutarch to ascribe the inspiration of iEschylus to 
the influence of the grape."^ The dialogue of the 
piece is of a most inartificial texture, and to an Eng- 
lish audience might sometimes appear flat. The 
action moves heavily, and the principal, indeed, with 
the exception of Agamemnon, the only attempt at 
character, is in the part of Clytemnestra, whose gi- 
gantic stature overshadows the whole piece, and who 
appals the spectator by avowing the deed of assas- 
sination with the same ferocity with which she had 
executed it. 

Alfieri, on the other hand, refuses the subsidiary 
aids of poetical imagery. He expressly condemns, 
in his criticisms, a confounding of the lyric and the 
dramatic styles. He elaborated his dialogue with 
the nicest art, and with exclusive reference to the 

* Sympos. LVII., Prob. 10. In the same spirit, a critic of a more pol- 
ished age has denounced Shakspeare's Hamlet as the work of a drunken 
savage ! See Voltaire's Dissertation sur la Tragedie, &c., addressed to 
Cardinal Querini. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 541 

final catastrophe. Scence. non levis artifex. His 
principal aim is to exhibit the collision of passions. 
The conflicts between passion and principle in the 
bosom of Clytemnestra, whom he has made a sub- 
ordinate agent, furnish him with his most powerful 
scenes. He has portrayed the lago-like features of 
^gisthus in the darkest colours of Itahan ven- 
geance. The noble nature of Agamemnon stands 
more fully developed than in the Greek, and the 
sweet character of Electra is all his own. The as- 
sassination of the king of men in his bed, at the 
lonely hour of midnight, must forcibly remind the 
Enghsh reader of the similar scene in Macbeth ; but, 
though finely conceived, it is far inferior to the latter 
in those fearful poetical accompaniments which give 
such an air of breathless horror to the story. In 
solemn, mysterious imaginings, who indeed can 
equal Shakspeare? He is the only modern poet 
who has succeeded in introducing the dim form of 
an apparition on the stage with any tolerable effect. 
Yet Voltaire accuses him of mistaking the horrible 
for the terrible. When Voltaire had occasion to 
raise a ghost upon the French stage (a ticklish ex- 
periment), he made him so amiable in his aspect 
that Queen Semiramis politely desires leave to 
" throw herself at his feet and to embrace them."* 

It has been a matter of debate whether Itahan 
tragedy, as reformed by Alfieri, is an improvement 
on the French. Both are conducted on the same 
general principles. A. W. Schlegel, a competent 

* Semiramis, acte iii., s. 6. 



542 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

critic whenever his own prejudices are not involved, 
decides in favour of the French. We must confess 
ourselves inclined to a different opinion. The three 
master-spirits in French tragedy seem to have con- 
tained within themselves all the elements of dramat- 
ic creation, yet their best performances have some- 
thing tame and unsatisfactory in them. We see the 
influence of that fine-spun web of criticism which 
in France has bound the wing of genius to the 
earth, and which no one has been hardy enough to 
burst asunder. Corneille, after a severe lesson, sub- 
mitted to it, though with an ill grace. The flexible 
character of Racine moved under it with more free- 
dom, but he was of too timid a temper to attempt to 
contravene estabhshed prejudices. His reply to one 
who censured him for making Hippolyte in love, in 
his Phedre, is well known : " What would our pe- 
tits-maitres have said had I omitted it V Voltaire, 
although possessed of a more enterprising and revo- 
lutionary spirit, left the essential principles of the 
drama as he found them. His multifarious criticisms 
exhibit a perpetual paradox. His general principles 
are ever at variance with their particular application. 
No one lauds more highly the scientific system of 
his countrymen ; witness his numerous dramatic 
prefaces, dedications, and articles in the encyclope- 
dia. He even refines upon it with hypercritical 
acumen, as in his commentaries on Corneille. But 
when he feels its tyrannical pressure on himself, he 
is sure to wince ; see, for example, his lamentable 
protest in his Preface to Brutus. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 543 

Aliieri acknowledged the paramount authority of 
the ancients equally with the French dramatic wri- 
ters. He has but thrice violated the unity of place, 
and very rarely that of time ; but, with all his def- 
erence for antiquity, the Italian poet has raised him- 
self far above the narrow code of French criticism. 
He has relieved tragedy from that eternal chime of 
love-sick damsels, so indispensable in a French 
piece, that, as Voltaire informs us, out of four hun- 
dred which had appeared before his time, there were 
not more than twelve which did not turn upon love. 
He substituted in its place a more pure and exalted 
sentiment. It will be difficult to find, even in Ra- 
cine, such beautiful personifications of female loveli- 
ness as his Electra and Micol, to name no others. 
He has, moreover, dispensed with the confidantes, 
those insipid shadows that so invariably walk the 
round of the French stage. Instead of insulated ax- 
ioms, and long, rhetorical pleadings, he has introdu- 
ced a brisk, moving dialogue ; and instead of the 
ceremonious breeding, the perruque and chapeau 
horde of Louis XlV.th's court, his personages, to 
borrow an allusion from a sister art, are sculptured 
with the bold, natural freedom which distinguishes 
the school of Michael Angelo. 

It is true that they are apt to show too much of 
the same fierce and sarcastic temper, too much of a 
family likeness with himself and with one another ; 
that he sometimes mistakes passion for poetry ; that 
he has left this last too naked of imagery and rhe- 
torical ornament ; that he is sometimes stilted when 



544 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

he would be dignified ; and that his affected energy 
is too often carried into mere muscular contortions. 
His system has, indeed, the appearance of an aspi- 
ration after some ideal standard of excellence which 
he could not wholly attain. It is sufficient proof of 
his power, however, that he succeeded in establish- 
ing it, in direct opposition to the ancient taste of 
his countrymen, to their love of poetic imagery, of 
verbal melody, and voluptuousness of sentiment. It 
is the triumph of genius over the prejudices, and 
even the constitutional feelings of a nation. 

We have dwelt thus long on Alfieri, because, like 
Dante, he seems himself to constitute a separate de- 
partment in Italian hterature. It is singular that the 
two poets who present the earliest and the latest 
models of surpassing excellence in this literature 
should bear so few of its usual characteristics. Al- 
fieri' s example has effected a decided revolution in 
the theatrical taste of his countrymen. It has called 
forth the efforts of some of their most gifted minds. 
Monti, perhaps the most eminent of this school, sur- 
passes him in the graces of an easy and brilliant el- 
ocution, but falls far below him in energy of concep- 
tion and character. The stoical system of Alfieri 
would seem, indeed, better adapted to his own pecu- 
liar temperament than to that of his nation ; and the 
successful experiment of Manzoni in discarding the 
unities, and otherwise relaxing the unnatural rigidity 
of this system, would appear to be much better suit- 
ed to the popular taste as well as talent. 

Our limits, necessarily far too scanty for our sub- 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 545 

ject, will not allow us to go into the Opera and the 
Pastoral Drama, two beautiful divisions in this de- 
partment of Itahan letters. It is singular that the 
former, notwithstanding the natural sensibility of the 
Itahans to harmony, and the melody of their lan- 
guage, which almost sets itself to music as it is spo- 
ken, should have been so late in coming to its per- 
fection under Metastasio. Nothing can be more 
unfair than to judge of this author, or, indeed, of 
any composer of operas, by the effect produced on 
us in the closet. Their pieces are intended to be 
exhibited, not read. The sentimental ariettes of the 
heroes, the romantic bombast of the heroines, the 
racks, ropes, poisoned daggers, and other fee-faw-fum 
of a nursery tale, so plentifully besprinkled over 
them, have certainly, in the closet, a \Qxy fade and 
ridiculous aspect ; but an opera should be consider- 
ed as an appeal to the senses, by means of the illu- 
sions of music, dancing, and decorations. The po- 
etry, wit, sentiment, intrigue, are mere accessories, 
and of value only as they may serve to promote this 
illusion. Hence the necessity of love — love, the 
vivifying principle of the opera, the only passion in 
perfect accordance with its voluptuous movements. 
Hence the propriety of exhibiting character in ex- 
aggerated colour of light and shadow, the chim-'' os- 
curo of poetry, as the imagination is most forcibly 
affected by powerful contrast. Yet this has been 
often condemned in Metastasio. On the above 
principle, too, the seasonable disclosures, miraculous 
escapes, and all the other magical apparatus before 
Z zz 



546 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

alluded to, may be defended. The mind of the 
spectator, highly stimulated through the medium of 
the senses, requires a corresponding extravagance, if 
we may so say, in the creations of the poet. In this 
state, a veracious copy of nature would fall flat and 
powerless ; to reach the heart, it must be raised into 
gigantic proportions, and adorned with a brighter 
flush of colouring than is to be found in real life. 
As a work of art, then, but not as a purely intellect- 
ual exhibition, we may criticise the opera, and, in 
this view of it, the peculiarities so often condemned 
in the artist may be, perhaps, sufficiently justified. 

The Pastoral Drama, that attempt to shadow 
forth the beautiful absurdities of a golden age, claims 
to be invented by the Itahans. It was carried to its 
ultimate perfection in two of its earliest specimens, 
the poems of Tasso and Guarini. Both these wri- 
ters have adorned their subject with the highest 
charms of versification and imagery. With Tasso 
all this seems to proceed spontaneously from the 
heart, while Guarini's Pastor Fido, on the other 
hand, has the appearance of being elaborated with 
the nicest preparation. It may, in truth, be regard- 
ed as the sohtary monument of his genius, and as 
such he seems to have been desirous to concentrate 
within it every possible variety of excellence. Du- 
ring his whole life he was employed in retouching 
and enriching it with new beauties. This great va- 
riety and finish of details somewhat impair its unity, 
and give it too much the appearance of a curious 
collection of specimens. Yet there are those, and 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 547 

very competent critics, too, who prefer the splendid 
patchwork of Guarini to the sweet, unsoUcited beau- 
ties of his rival. Dr. Johnson has condemned both 
the Aminta and Pastor Fido as " trifles easily imi- 
tated and unworthy of imitation." The Italians 
have not found them so. Out of some hundred 
specimens cited by Serassi, only three or four are 
deemed by him worthy of notice. An Enghsh critic 
should have shown more charity for a kind of com^ 
position that has given rise to some of the most ex^ 
quisite creations of Fletcher and Milton. 

We have now reviewed the most important 
branches of the ornamental literature of the Italians. 
We omit some others, less conspicuous, or not es- 
sentially differing in their characteristics from sim- 
ilar departments in the literatures of other European 
nations. An exception may perhaps be made in 
favour of satirical writing, which, with the Italians, 
assumes a peculiar form, and one quite indicative of 
the national genius. Satire, in one shape or anoth- 
er, has been a great favourite with them, from Ari- 
osto, or, indeed, we may say Dante, to the present 
time. It is, for the most part, of a Ught, vivacious 
character, rather playful than pointed. Their crit- 
ics, with their usual precision, have subdivided it 
into a great variety of classes, among which the Ber- 
nesque is the most original. This epithet, derived 
not, as some have supposed, from the rifacimento, 
but from the Capitoli of Berni, designates a style of 
writing compounded of the beautiful and the bur- 
lesque, of which it is nearly impossible to convey an 



548 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

adequate notion, either by translation or description, 
in a foreign language. Even so mature a scholar as 
Mr. Roscoe has failed to do this, when, in one of 
his histories, he compares this manner to that of 
Peter Pindar, and in the other to that of Sterne. 
But the Italian has neither the coarse diction of the 
former nor the sentiment of the latter. It is gener- 
ally occupied with some frivolous topic, to which it 
ascribes the most extravagant properties, descanting 
on it through whole pages of innocent irony, and 
clothing the most vulgar and oftentimes obscene 
ideas in the polished phrase or idiomatic graces of 
expression that never fail to disarm an Italian critic. 
A foreigner, however, not so sensible to the seduc- 
tions of style, will scarcely see in it anything more 
than a puerile debauch of fancy. 

Historians are fond of distributing the literature 
of Italy into masses, chronologically arranged in suc- 
cessive centuries. The successive revolutions in 
this literature justify the division to a degree un- 
known in that of any other country, and a brief il- 
lustration of it may throw some additional light on 
our subject. 

Thus the fourteenth century, the age of the tre- 
centisti, as it is called, the age of Dante, Petrarch, 
and Boccaccio, is the period of high and original in- 
vention. These three great writers, who are alone 
capable of attracting our attention at this distance 
of time, were citizens of a free state, and were early 
formed to the contemplation and practice of pubhc 
virtue. Hence their works manifest an independ- 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 549 

ence and a generous self-confidence that we seek in 
vain in the productions of a later period, forced in 
the artificial atmosphere of a court. Their writings 
are marked, moreover, by a depth of reflection not 
to be discerned in the poets of a similar period of 
antiquity, the pioneers of the civilization of their 
times. The human mind was then in its infancy ; 
but in the fourteenth century it seemed to awake 
from the slumber of ages, with powers newly invig- 
orated, and a memory stored with the accumulated 
wisdom of the past. Compare, for example, the Di- 
vine Comedy with the poems of Homer and He- 
siod, and observe how much superior to these latter 
writers is the Italian in moral and intellectual sci- 
ence, as well as in those higher speculations which 
relate to our ultimate destiny.* The rhetorical 
beauties of the great works of the fourteenth cen- 
tury have equally contributed to their permanent 
popularity and influence. While the early produc- 
tions of other countries, the poems of the Niebelun- 
gen, of the Cid, of the Norman trouveurs, and those 
of Chaucer, even, have passed, in consequence of 
their colloquial barbarisms, into a certain degree of 
oblivion, the writings of the trecentisti are still re- 
vered as the models of purity and elegance, to be 
forever imitated, though never equalled. 

The following age exhibits the reverse of all this. 
It was as remarkable for the general diflusion of 

* Hesiod, it is true, has digested a compact body of ethics, wonderfully 
mature for the age in which he wrote ; but the best of it is disfigured 
with those childish superstitions which betray the twilight of civilization. 
See, in particular, the concluding portion of his Works and Days. 



550 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

learning as the preceding had been for the concen- 
tration of talent. The Itahan, which had been so 
successfully cultivated, came to be universally neg- 
lected for the ancient languages. It would seem 
as if the soil, exhausted by too abundant harvests, 
must lie fallow another century before it could be 
capable of reproduction. The scholars of that day 
disdained any other than the Latin tongue for the 
medium of their pubhcations, or even of their private 
epistolary correspondence. They thought, with 
Waller, that 

" Those who lasting marble seek, 
Must carve in Latin or in Greek." 

But the marble has crumbled into dust, while the 
natural beauties of their predecessors are still green 
in the memory of their countrymen. To make use 
of a simile which Dr. Young applied to Ben Jonson, 
they " pulled down, like Samson, the temple of an- 
tiquity on their shoulders, and buried themselves un- 
der its ruins." 

But let us not err by despising these men as a 
race of unprofitable pedants. They lived on the 
theatre of ancient art, in an age when new discov- 
eries were daily making of the long-lost monuments 
of intellectual and material beauty, and it is no won- 
der that, dazzled with the contemplation of these 
objects, they should have been blind to the modest 
merits of their contemporaries. We should be grate- 
ful to men whose indefatigable labours preserved for 
us the perishable remains of classic literature, and 
who thus opened a free and famihar converse with 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 551 

the great minds of antiquity; and we may justly feel 
some degree of reverence for the enthusiasm of an 
age in which the scholar was willing to exchange 
his learned leisure for painful and perilous pilgrim- 
ages, when the merchant was content to barter his 
rich freights for a few mouldering, worm-eaten folios, 
and when the present of a single manuscript was 
deemed of sufficient value to heal the dissensions of 
two rival states. Such was the fifteenth century in 
Italy ; and Tiraboschi, warming as he approaches 
it, in his preface to the sixth volume of his history, 
has accordingly invested it with more than his usual 
blaze of panegyric. 

The genius of the ItaHans, however, was sorely 
fettered by their adoption of an ancient idiom, and, 
like Tasso's Erminia, when her delicate form was 
enclosed in the iron mail of the warrior, lost its elas- 
ticity and grace. But at the close of the century 
the Italian muse was destined to regain her natural 
freedom in the court of Lorenzo de' Medici. His 
own compositions, especially, are distinguished by a 
romantic sweetness, and his hght, popular pieces — 
Carnascialeschi, Contadineschi — so abundantly im- 
itated since, have a buoyant, exhilarating air, wholly 
unhke the pedantic tone of his age. Under these 
new auspices, however, the Italian received a very 
different complexion from that which had been im- 
parted to it by the hand of Dante. 

The sixteenth century is the healthful, the Au- 
gustan age of Italian letters. The conflicting prin- 
ciples of an ancient and a modern school are, how- 



552 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ever, to be traced throughout almost the whole 
course of it. A curious passage from Varchi, who 
flourished about the middle of this century, informs 
us that, when he was at school, it was the custom 
of the instructers to interdict to their pupils the 
study of any vernacular writer, even Dante and Pe- 
trarch.* Hence the Latin came to be cultivated 
almost equally with the Italian, and both, singularly 
enough, attained simultaneously their full develop- 
ment. 

There are few phrases more inaccurately applied 
than that of the Age of Leo X., to whose brief pon- 
tificate we are accustomed to refer most of the mag- 
nificent creations of genius scattered over the six- 
teenth century, although very few, even of those 
produced in his own reign, can be imputed to his 
influence. The nature of this influence in regard to 
Italian letters may even admit of question. His 
early taste led him to give an almost exclusive at- 
tention to the ancient classics. The great poets of 
that century, Ariosto, Sanazzaro, the Tassos, Rucel- 
lai, Guarini, and the rest, produced their immortal 
works far from Leo's court. Even Bembo, the or- 
acle of his day, retired in disgust from his patron, 
and composed his principal writings in his retreat. 
Ariosto, his ancient friend, he coldly neglected,t 
while he pensioned the infamous Aretin. He sur- 
rounded his table with buflbon literati and parasit- 

* Ercolano, ques. VIII. 

t Roscoe attempts to explain away this conduct of Leo, but the satires 
of the poet furnish a bitter commentary upon it, not to be misunderstood. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 553 

ical poets, who amused him with feats of improvisa- 
tion, gluttony, and intemperance, some of whom, 
after expending on them his convivial wit, he turn- 
ed over to public derision, and most of whom, de- 
bauched in morals and constitution, were abandon- 
ed, under his austere successor, to infamy and death. 
He collected about him such court-flies as Berni 
and Molza; but, as if the papal atmosphere were 
fatal to high continued effort, even Berni, like Tris- 
sino and Rucellai, could find no leisure for his more 
elaborate performance till after his patron's death. 
He magnificently recompensed his musical retainers, 
making one an archbishop, another an archdeacon ; 
but what did he do for his countryman MachiavelH, 
the philosopher of his age P He hunted, and hawk- 
ed, and caroused ; everything w^as a jest ; and while 
the nations of Europe stood aghast at the growing 
heresy of Luther, the merry pontifl" and his minis- 
ters found strange matter of mirth in witnessing the 
representation of comedies that exposed the impu- 
dent mummeries of priestcraft. With such an ex- 
ample, and under such an influence, it is no wonder 
that nothing better should have been produced than 
burlesque satire, licentious farces, and frivolous im- 
promptus. Contrast all this with the elegant recre- 
ations of the little court of Urbino, as described in 
the Cortegiano ; or compare the whole result on 
Itahan letters of the so much vaunted patronage of 

* Machiavelli, after having suffered torture on account of a suspected 
conspiracy against the Medici, in which his participation was never pro- 
ved, was allowed to linger out his days in poverty and disgrace. 

4A 



554 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

this luxurious pontiff with the splendid achievements 
of the petty state of Este alone, during the first half 
of this century, and it will appear that there are few 
misnomers which convey grosser misconceptions 
than that of the age of Leo X. 

The seventeenth century {seicento) is one of hu- 
miliation in the literary annals of Italy ; one in 
which the Muse, like some dilapidated beauty, en- 
deavoured to supply the loss of natural charms by 
all the aids of coquetry and meretricious ornament. 
It is the prodigal use of " these false brilliants," as 
Boileau terms them, in some of their best writers, 
which has brought among foreigners an undeserved 
discredit on the whole body of Italian letters, and 
which has made the condemned age of the seicentisti 
a by-word of reproach even with their own country- 
men. The principles of a corrupt taste are, how- 
ever, to be discerned at an earher period, in the wri- 
tings of Tasso especially, and still more of Guarini ; 
but it was reserved for Marini to reduce them into 
a system, and by his popularity and foreign resi- 
dence to diffuse the infection among the other na- 
tions of Europe. To this source, therefore, most of 
these nations have agreed to refer the impurities 
w^hich, at one time or another, have disfigured their 
literatures. Thus the Spaniard Lampillas has mus- 
tered an array of seven volumes to prove the charge 
of original corruption on the Italians, though Marini 
openly affected to have formed himself upon a Span- 
ish model* In like manner. La Harpe imputes to 

* Obras suelt de Lope de Vega, torn, xxi., p. 17. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 555 

them the sins of Jodelle and the contemporary wits, 
though these last preceded, by some years, the hter- 
ary existence of Marini ; and the vices of the Eng- 
Ksh metaphysical school have been expressly refer- 
red, by Dr. Johnson, to Marini and his followers. 

A nearer inspection, however, might justify the 
opinion that these various affectations bear too much 
of the physiognomy of the respective nations in 
which they are found, and are capable of being tra- 
ced to too high a source in each, to be thus exclu- 
sively imputed to the ItaUans. Thus the elements 
of the cuUismo of the Spaniards, that compound of 
flat pedantry and Oriental hyperbole, so different 
from the fine concetti of the Italian, are to be traced 
through some of their most eminent writers up to 
the fugitive pieces of the fifteenth century, as col- 
lected in their Cancioneros ; and, in like manner, 
the elements of the metaphysical jargon of Cowley, 
whose intellectual combinations and far-fetched 
analogies show too painful a research after wit for 
the Italian taste, may be traced in England through 
Donne and Ben Jonson, to say nothing of the " un- 
paralleled John Lillie," up to the veteran versifiers 
of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thus, 
also, some features of the style precieux of the Hotel 
de Rambouillet, so often lashed by Boileau and 
laughed at by Moliere, may be imputed to the ma- 
lign influence of the constellation of pedants, cele- 
brated in France under the title of Pleiades, in the 
sixteenth century. 

The Greek is the only literature which, from the 



556 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

first, seems to have maintained a sound and healthful 
state. In every other, the barbaric love of ornament, 
so discernible even in the best of the early writers, 
has been chastised only by long and assiduous crit- 
icism ; but the principle of corruption still remains, 
and the season of perfect ripeness seems to be only 
that of the commencement of decay. Thus it was 
in Italy, in the perverted age of the seicentisii, an 
age yet warm with the productions of an Ariosto 
and a Tasso. 

The literature of the Italians assumed in the last 
century a new and highly improved aspect. With 
less than its usual brilliancy of imagination, it dis- 
played an intensity, and, under the circumstances in 
which it has been produced, we may add, intrepid- 
ity of thought quite worthy of the great spirits of 
the fourteenth century, and a freedom and nature in 
its descriptions altogether opposed to the heartless 
affectations of the seventeenth. The prejudicial in- 
fluence of their neighbours threatened at one time, 
indeed, to precipitate the language into a French 
macheronico ; but a counter-current, equally exclu- 
sive, in favour of the trecentisti, contributed to check 
the innovation, and to carry them back to the an- 
cient models of purity and vigour. The most emi- 
nent writers of this period seem to have formed 
themselves on Dante, in particular, as studiously as 
those of the preceding age affected the more effem- 
inate graces of Petrarch. Among these, Monti, who, 
in the language of his master, may be truly said to 
have inherited from him "Lo bello stile, che I'ha 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 557 

fatto onore," is thought most nearly to resemble 
Dante in the literary execution of his verses ; while 
Alfieri, Parini, and Foscolo approach him still near- 
er in the rugged virtue and independence of their 
sentiments. There seems to be a didactic import in 
much of the poetry of this age, too, and in its de- 
scriptions of external nature, a sober, contemplative 
vein, that may remind us of w^riters in our own lan- 
guage. Indeed, an Enghsh influence is clearly dis- 
cernible in some of the most eminent poets of this 
period, who have either visited Great Britain in per- 
son, or made themselves famihar with its language.* 
The same influence may be, perhaps, recognised in 
the moral complexion of many of their compositions, 
the most elegant specimen of which is probably Pa- 
rini's satire, which disguises the sarcasm of Cowper 
in the rich, embroidered verse which belongs to the 
Italians. 

In looking back on the various branches of liter- 
ature which we have been discussing, we are struck 
with the almost exclusive preference given to poetry 
over prose, with the great variety of beautiful forms 
which the former exhibits, with its finished versifica- 
tion, its inexhaustible inventions, and a wit that nev- 
er tires. But in all this admirable mechanism we too 
often feel the want of an informing soul, of a nobler, 
or, at least, some more practical object than mere 
amusement. Their writers too rarely seem to feel, 

" Divinity within them, breeding wings 
Wherewith to spurn the earth." 

* Among these may be mentioned Monti, Pindemonte, Cesarotti, Maz- 
za, Alfieri, Pignotti, and Foscolo. 



558 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

They have gone beyond every other people in paint- 
ing the intoxication of voluptuous passion ; but how 
rarely have they exhibited it in its purer and more 
ethereal form ! How^ rarely have they built up 
their dramatic or epic fables on national or patriotic 
recollections ! Even satire, disarmed of its moral 
sting, becomes in their hands a barren, though per- 
haps a brilliant jest — the harmless electricity of a 
summer sky. 

The pecuUar inventions of a people best shovs^ 
their peculiar genius. The romantic epic has as- 
sumed with the Italians a perfectly original form, in 
which, stripped of the fond illusions of chivalry, it 
has descended, through all the gradations of mirth, 
from well-bred raillery to broad and bald buffoonery. 
In the same merry vein their various inventions in 
the burlesque style have been conceived. Whole 
cantos of these puerilities have been strung together 
with a patience altogether unrivalled, except by that 
of their indefatigable commentators.* Even the 
most austere intellects of the nation, a Machiavelli 
and a Galileo, for example, have not disdained to 
revel in this frivolous debauch of fancy, and may re- 
mind one of Michael Angelo, at the instance of Pi- 
etro de' Medici, employing his transcendent talents 
in sculpturing a perishable statue of snow ! 

The general scope of our vernacular literature, as 
contrasted with that of the Itahan, will set the pe- 
culiarities of the latter in a still stronger light. In 

* The annotations upon Lippi's burlesque poem of the Malmantile Rac- 
quistata are inferior in bulk to those only on the Divine Comedy. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 559 

the English, the drama and the novel, which may be 
considered as its staples, aiming at more than a vul- 
gar interest, have always been made the theatre of 
a scientific dissection of character. Instead of the 
romping merriment of the novelle, it is furnished with 
those periodical essays which, in the form of apo- 
logue, of serious disquisition or criticism, convey to 
us lessons of practical wisdom. Its pictures of ex- 
ternal nature have been deepened by a sober con- 
templation not familiar to the mercurial fancy of 
the Italians. Its biting satire, from Pierce Plow- 
man's Visions to the Baviad and Mseviad of our day, 
instead of breaking into vapid jests, has been sharp- 
ened against the follies or vices of the age, and the 
body of its poetry, in general, from the days of 
" moralle Gower" to those of Cowper and Words- 
worth, breathes a spirit of piety and unsuUied virtue. 
Even Spenser deemed it necessary to shroud the 
eccentricities of his Italian imagination in sober al- 
legory ; and Milton, while he adopted in his Comus 
the beautiful and somewhat luxurious form of the 
Aminta and Pastor Fido, animated it with the most 
devotional sentiments. 

The political situation of Italy may afford a key 
to some of the peculiarities of her literature. Op- 
pressed by foreign or domestic tyrants for more than 
five centuries, she has been condemned, in the in- 
dignant language of her poet, 

" Per servir sempre, o vincitrice o vinta." 

Her citizens, excluded from the higher walks of 
public action, have too often resigned themselves to 



560 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

corrupt and eiFeminate pleasure, and her writers, in- 
hibited from the free discussion of important topics, 
have too frequently contented themselves with an 
impotent play of fancy. The histories of Machia- 
velli and of Guicciardini were not permitted to be 
published entire until the conclusion of the last cen- 
tury. The writings of Alemanni, from some um- 
brage given to the Medici, were burned by the hands 
of the common hangman. Marchetti's elegant ver- 
sion of Lucretius was long prohibited on the ground 
of its epicurean philosophy, and the learned labours 
of Giannone were recompensed with exile. Under 
such a government, it is wonderful that so many, 
rather than so few writers, should have been found 
with intrepidity sufficient to raise the voice of un- 
welcome truth. It is not to be wondered at that 
they should have produced so few models of civil 
or sacred eloquence, the fruit of a happier and more 
enlightened system ; that they should have been too 
exclusively devoted to mere beauties of form ; have 
been more solicitous about style than thought; have 
studied rather to amuse than to instruct. Hence 
the superabundance of their philological treatises 
and mere verbal criticisms, of their tomes of com- 
mentaries, with which they have illustrated or ob- 
scured their most insignificant poets, where a verse 
furnishes matter for a lecture, and a canzone becomes 
the text for a volume. This is no exaggeration.* 

* Benedetto of Ravenna wrote ten lectures on the fourth sonnet of 
Petrarch. Pico della Mirandola devoted three whole books to the illus- 
tration of a canzone of his friend Benivieni, and three Arcadians publish- 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 561 

Hence, too, the frequency and ferocity of their lit- 
erary quarrels, into which the Italians, excluded too 
often from weightier disquisition, enter with an en- 
thusiasm which in other nations can be roused only 
by the dearest interests of humanity. The compar- 
ative merit of some obscure classic, the orthography 
of some obsolete term, a simple sonnet, even, has 
been sufficient to throw the whole community into 
a ferment, in which the parties have not always 
confined themselves to a war of words. 

The influence of academies on Itahan hterature 
is somewhat doubtful. They have probably contrib- 
uted to nourish that epicurean sensibihty to mere 
verbal elegance so conspicuous in the nation. The 
great variety of these institutions scattered over every 
remote district of the country, the whimsicality of 
their titles, and still more of those of their members, 
have an air sufficiently ridiculous.* Some of them 
have been devoted to the investigation of science. 
But a license, refused to individuals, will hardly be 
conceded to public associations ; and the persecution 
of some of the most eminent has proved an effectual 
warning to confine their speculations within the in- 
offensive sphere of literary criticism. Hence the ex- 
uberance of prose and lezioni, endless dissertations 

ed a volume in defence of the Tre Sorelle of Petrarch ! It would be easy 
to multiply similar examples of critical prodigality. 

* Take at hazard some of the most familiar, the "Ardent," the "Fro- 
zen," the " Wet," the " Dry," the •' Stupid," the " Lazy." The Cruscan 
takes its name from Crusca (bran) ; and its members adopted the corre- 
sponding epithets of " brown bread," " white bread," " the kneaded," &c. 
Some of the Italians, as Lasca, La Bindo, for instance, are better known 
by their frivolous academic names than by their own. 

4B 



562 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

on barren rhetorical topics; and those vapid attempts 
at academic wit, which should never have trans- 
cended the bounds of the Lyceum. 

It is not in such institutions that the great intel- 
lectual efforts of a nation are displayed. All that 
any academy can propose to itself is to keep aUve 
the flame which genius has kindled, and in more 
than one instance they have gone near to smother it. 
The French academy, as is well known, opened its 
career with its celebrated attack upon Corneille ; 
and the earliest attempt of the Cruscan was upon 
Tasso's Jerusalem, which it compelled its author to 
remodel, or, in other words, to reduce, by the extrac- 
tion of its essential spirit, into a flat and insipid de- 
coction. Denina has sarcastically intimated that the 
era of the foundation of this latter academy corre- 
sponds exactly with that of the commencement of 
the dechne of good taste. More liberal critics con- 
cede, however, that this body has done much to pre- 
serve the integrity of the tongue, and that a pure 
spirit of criticism was kept alive within its bosom 
Avhen it had become extinct in almost every other 
part of Italy.* Their philological labours have, in 
truth, been highly valuable, though perhaps not so 
completely successful as those of the French acad- 
emicians. We do not allude to any capricious prin- 
ciple on which their vocabulary may have been con- 
structed, an affair of their own critics ; but to the 
iact that, after all, they have not been able to settle 

'^ See, in particular, the treatise of Parini, himself a Lombard, De' 
principi delle Belle Lettere, part ii., cap. v. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 563 

the language with the same precision and uniformity 
with which it has been done in France, from the 
want of some great metropohs, hke Paris, whose au- 
thority would be received as paramount throughout 
the country. No such universal deference has been 
paid to the Cruscan academy ; and the Itahan lan- 
guage, far from being accurately determined, is even 
too loose and inexact for the common purposes of 
business. Perhaps it is for this very reason better 
adapted to the ideal purposes of poetry. 

The exquisite mechanism of the Italian tongue, 
made up of the very elements of music, and pictu- 
resque in its formation beyond that of any other liv- 
ing language, is undoubtedly a cause of the exagger- 
ated consequence imputed to style by the writers of 
the nation. The author of the Dialogue on Orators 
points out, as one of the symptoms of depraved elo- 
quence in Rome, that " voluptuous artificial harmony 
of cadence, which is better suited to the purposes of 
the musician or the dancer than of the orator." The 
same vice has infected Italian prose from its earliest 
models, from Boccaccio and Bembo down to the 
most ordinary book-wri^ht of the present day, who 
hopes to disguise his poverty of thought under his 
melodious redundancy of diction. Hence it is that 
their numerous Letters, Dialogues, and their speci- 
mens of written eloquence, are too often defective 
both in natural force and feeling. Even in those 
graver productions which derive almost their sole 
value from their facts, they are apt to be far more so- 
licitous about style and ingenious turns of thought, 



564 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

as one of their own critics has admitted, than either 
utihty or sound philosophy.* 

A principal cause, after all, of the various pecu- 
liarities of Italian literature, of which we have been 
speaking, is to be traced to that fine perception of 
the beautiful, so inherent in every order of the nation, 
whether it proceed from a happier physical organi- 
zation, or from an early famiharity with those models 
of ideal beauty by which they are everywhere sur- 
rounded. Whoever has visited Italy must have been 
struck with a sensibihty to elegant pleasure, and a 
refinement of taste in the very lowest classes, that in 
other countries belong only to the more cultivated. 
This is to be discerned in the most trifling particu- 
lars ; in their various costume, whose picturesque ar- 
rangement seems to have been studied from the mod- 
els of ancient statuary; in the flowers and other taste- 
ful ornaments with which, on fete days, they deco- 
rate their chapels and public temples ; in the eager- 
ness with which the peasant and the artisan, after 
their daily toil, resort to the theatre, the opera, or 
similar intellectual amusements, instead of the bear- 
baitings, bull-fights, and drunken orgies so famihar 
to the populace of other countries ; and in the quiet 
rapture with which they listen for hours, in the pub- 
lic squares, to the strains of an improvisatore, or the 
recitations of a story-teller, without any other re- 
freshment than a glass of water. Even the art of 
improvisation, carried to such perfection by the Ital- 
ians, is far less imputable to the facilities of their 

* Bettinelli, Risorgira. d'ltalia, Introd., p. 14, 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 565 

verse than to the poetical genius of the people ; an 
evidence of which is the abundance of imjprovisatori 
in Latin in the sixteenth century, w^hen that language 
came to be widely cultivated. 

It is time, however, to conclude our remarks, which 
have already encroached too hberally on the pa- 
tience of our readers. Notwithstanding our sincere 
admiration, as generally expressed, for the beautiful 
literature of Italy, we fear that some of our reflec- 
tions may be unpalatable to a people who shrink 
with sensitive deUcacy from the rude touch of for- 
eign criticism. The most liberal opinions of a for- 
eigner, it is true, coming through so different a me- 
dium of prejudice and taste, must always present a 
somewhat distorted aspect to the eye of a native. 
On those finer shades of expression which consti- 
tute, indeed, much of the value of poetry, none but a 
native can pronounce with accuracy ; but on its in- 
tellectual and moral character a foreign critic is bet- 
ter qualified to decide. He may be more perspica- 
cious, even, than a native, in detecting those obU- 
quities from a correct standard of taste, to which the 
latter has been reconciled by prejudice and long ex- 
ample, or which he may have learned to reverence 
as beauties. 

There must be so many exceptions, too, to the 
sweeping range of any general criticism, that it will 
always carry with it a certain air of injustice. Thus, 
while we object to the ItaHans the diluted, redun- 
dant style of their compositions, may they not refer 
us to their versions of Tacitus and Perseus, the most 



566 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

condensed writers in the most condensed language 
in the world, in a form equally compact with that 
of the originals ? May they not object to us Dante 
and Alfieri, scarcely capable of translation into any 
modern tongue, in the same compass, without a vi- 
olence to idiom ] And may they not cite the same 
hardy models in refutation of an unqualified charge 
of effeminacy 1 Where shall we find examples of 
purer and more exalted sentiment than in the wri- 
tings of Petrarch and Tasso 1 Where of a more 
chastised composition than in Casa or Caro 1 And 
where more pertinent examples of a didactic aim 
than in their numerous poetical treatises on hus- 
bandry, manufactures, and other useful arts, which 
in other countries form the topics of bulky disquisi- 
tions in prose ? This is all just. But such excep- 
tions, however imposing, in no way contravene the 
general truth of our positions, founded on the 2?reV' 
alent tone and characteristics of Italian literature. 

Let us not, however, appear insensible to the 
merits of a literature, pre-eminent above all others 
for activity of fancy and beautiful variety of form, or 
to those of a country so fruitful in interesting recol- 
lections to the scholar and the artist; in which the 
human mind has displayed its highest energies un- 
tired through the longest series of ages ; on which 
the light of science shed its parting ray, and where 
it first broke again upon the nations ; whose history- 
is the link that connects the past with the present, 
the ancient with the modern, and whose enterprising 
genius enlarged the boundaries of the Old World 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS. 567 

by the discovery of a New ; whose scholars opened 
to mankind the intellectual treasures of antiquity; 
whose schools first expounded those principles of 
law which have become the basis of jurisprudence 
in most of the civihzed nations of Europe ; whose 
cities gave the earhest example of free institutions, 
and, when the vision of liberty had passed away, 
maintained their empire over the mind by those ad- 
mirable productions of art that revive the bright pe- 
riod of Grecian glory ; and who, even now, that her 
palaces are made desolate and her vineyards trodden 
down under the foot of the stranger, retains within 
her bosom all the fire of ancient genius. It would 
show a strange insensibility indeed did we not sym- 
pathize in the fortunes of a nation that has mani- 
fested, in such a variety of ways, the highest intel- 
lectual power ; of which we may exclaim, in the 
language which a modern poet has applied to one 
of the most beautiful of her cities, 

" Decus, Lux 
Ausoniae, per quam libera turba sumus, 
er quam Barbaries nobis non imperat, et Sol 
Exoriens nostro clarius orbe nitet !" 



568 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



SCOTTISH SONG.* 

J U L Y, 1 S 2 6. 

It is remarkable that poetry, which is esteemed 
so much more difficult than prose among cultivated 
people, should universally have been the form vs^hich 
man, in the primitive stages of society, has adopted 
for the easier development of his ideas. It may be 
that the infancy of nations, hke that of individuals, 
is more taken up with imagination and sentiment 
than with reasoning, and is thus instinctively led to 
verse, as best suited, by its sweetness and harmony, 
to the expression of passionate thought. It may be, 
too, that the refinements of modern criticism have 
multiplied rather than reheved the difficulties of the 
art. The ancient poet poured forth his carmina in- 
condita with no other ambition than that of accom- 
modating them to the natural music of his own ear, 
careless of the punctilious observances which the 
fastidious taste of a polished age so peremptorily de- 
mands. However this may be, it is certain that 
poetry is more ancient than prose in the records of 
every nation, and that this poetry is found in its ear- 
liest stages almost always alhed with music. Thus 
the Rhapsodies of Homer were chanted to the sound 
of the lyre by the wandering bards of Ionia ; thus 
the citharoedi of the ancient Romans, the Welsh 

* "The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, with an Introduction 
and Notes, Historical and Critical, and the Characters of the Lyric Poets. 
Bv Allan Cunningham." In four volumes. London. 1825. 12mo. 



SCOTTISH SONG. 569 

harper, the Saxon gleeman, the Scandinavian scald, 
and the Norman minstrel, soothed the sensual appe- 
tites of an unlettered age by the more exalted charms 
of poetry and music. This precocious poetical spirit 
seems to have been more widely diffused among the 
modern than the ancient European nations. The 
astonishing perfection of the Homeric epics makes 
it probable, it is true, that there must have been pre- 
viously a diligent cultivation of the divine art among 
the natives.* 

The introduction of the bards Phemius and De- 
modocus into the Odyssey shows also that min- 
strelsy had long been familiar to Homer's country- 
men. This, however, is but conjecture, as no un- 
disputed fragments of this early age have come down 
to us. The Romans, we know, were not, till a very 
late period, moved by the impetus saceo\ One or two 
devotional chants and a few ribald satires are all 
that claim to be antiquities in their prosaic literature. 

It was far otherwise with the nations of modern 
Europe. Whether the romantic institutions of the 
age, or the warmth of classic literature not wholly 
extinguished, awakened this general enthusiasm, we 
know not ; but no sooner had the thick darkness, 
which for centuries had settled over the nations, be- 
gun to dissipate, than the voice of song was heard 
in the remotest corners of Europe, where heathen 
civilization had never ventured ; from the frozen 
isles of Britain and Scandinavia, no less than from 

* " Nee dubitari debet quin fuerint ante Homerura poetae." — Cic„ 
Brut., 18. 

4C 



570 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the fertile shores of Italy and Provence. We do not 
mean that the hght of song was totally extinguished, 
even at the darkest period. It may be faintly dis- 
cerned in the barbaric festivals of Attila, himself the 
theme of more than one venerable German romance ; 
and, at a later period, in the comparatively refined 
courts of Alfred and Charlemagne. 

But it was not until the eleventh or twelfth cen- 
tury that refinement of taste was far advanced among 
the nations of Europe ; that, in spite of all the ob- 
stacles of a rude, unconcocted dialect, the founda- 
tions and the forms of their poetical hterature were 
cast, which, with some modification, they have re- 
tained ever since. Of these, the ballads may be con- 
sidered as coming more immediately from the body 
of the people. In no country did they take such 
deep root as in Spain and Scotland, and, although 
cultivated more or less by all the Northern nations, 
yet nowhere else have they had the good fortune, 
by their own intrinsic beauty, and by the influence 
they have exerted over the popular character, to 
constitute so important a part of the national litera- 
ture. The causes of this are to be traced to the po- 
Utical relations of these countries. Spain, divided 
into a number of petty principalities, which contend- 
ed with each other for pre-eminence, was obliged to 
carry on a far more desperate struggle for existence, 
as well as rehgion, with its Saracen invaders ; who, 
after advancing their victorious crescent from the 
Arabian desert to the foot of the Pyrenees, had es- 
tablished a solid empire over the fairest portions of 



SCOTTISH SONG. 571 

the Peninsula. Seven long centuries was the an- 
cient Spaniard reclaiming, inch by inch, this con- 
quered territory ; thus a perpetual crusade was car- 
ried on, and the fertile fields of Andalusia and Gra- 
nada became the mimic theatre of exploits similar to 
those performed by the martial enthusiasts of Europe, 
on a much greater scale, indeed, on the plains of 
Palestine. The effect of all this was to infuse into 
their popular compositions a sort of devotional he- 
roism, which is to be looked for in vain in any other. 
The existence of the Cid, so early as the eleventh 
century, was a fortunate event for Spanish poetry. 
The authenticated actions of that chief are so near- 
ly alUed to the marvellous, that, like Charlemagne, 
he forms a convenient nucleus for the manifold fic- 
tions in which successive bards have enveloped him. 
The ballads relating to this doughty hero have been 
collected into a sort of patchwork epic, whose fabri- 
cation thus resembles that imputed to those ancient 
poems which some modern critics have determined 
to be but a tissue of rhapsodies executed by different 
masters. But, without comparing them with the 
epics of Homer in symmetry of design or perfection 
of versification, we may reasonably claim for them 
a moral elevation not inferior, and a tone of courtesy 
and generous gallantry altogether unknown to the 
heroes of the Ihad. 

The most interesting of the Spanish ballads are 
those relating to the Moors. This people, now so 
degraded in every intellectual and moral aspect, 
were, as is well known, in the ninth and tenth cen- 



572 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

turies the principal depositaries of useful science and 
elegant art. This is particularly true of the Span- 
ish cahphate ; and more than one Christian prelate 
is on record who, in a superstitious age, performed 
a literary pilgrimage to the schools of Cordova, and 
drank from these profane sources of wisdom. The 
peculiarities of Oriental costume ; their showy mili- 
tary exercises; their perilous bull-feasts and cane- 
fights ; their chivalric defiance and rencounters with 
the Christian knights on the plains before the assem- 
bled city ; their briUiant revels, romantic wooings, 
and midnight serenades, afforded rich themes for the 
muse ; above all, the capture and desolation of Gra- 
nada, that " city without peer," the " pride of heath- 
endom," on which the taste and treasures of the 
Western caHphs had been lavished for seven centu- 
ries, are detailed in a tone of melancholy grandeur, 
which comes over us like the voice of an expiring 
nation.* 

One trait has been pointed out in these poems 
most honourable to the Spanish character, and in 
which, in later times, it has been lamentably defi- 
cient, that of religious toleration ; we find none of 
the fierce bigotry which armed the iron hand of the 

* An ancient Arabian writer concludes a florid eulogmm on the ar- 
chitecture and local beauties of Granada in the fourteenth century, with 
likening it, in Oriental fashion, to " a richly-wrought vase of silver, filled 
with jacinths and emeralds." — Historia de los Arahes de Espana, torn, iii., 
p. 147. Among the ballads relating to the Moorish wars, two of the 
most beautiful are the " Lament over Alhama," indifferently translated 
by Byron, and that beginning with " En la ciudad de Granada," rendered 
by Lockhart with his usual freedom and vivacity. — Hita, i., 464, and 
Depptjig, 240. 



SCOTTISH SONG. 573 

Inquisition ; which coolly condemned to exile or 
the stake a numerous native population for an hon- 
est difference of religious opinion, and desolated with 
fire and sword the most flourishino: of their Chris- 
tian provinces. 

The ancient Spaniard, on the contrary, influenced 
by a more enlightened policy, as well as by human- 
ity, contracted famihar intimacies, nay, even matri- 
monial alhances, with his Mohammedan rivals, and 
the proudest of their nobles did not disdain, in an 
honest cause, to fight under the banners of the In- 
fidel. It would be a curious study to trace the prog- 
ress and the causes of this pitiable revolution in na- 
tional feeling. 

The Spaniards have good reason to cherish their 
ancient ballads, for nowhere is the high CastiUan 
character displayed to such advantage. Haughty, 
it is true, jealous of insult, and without the tincture 
of letters, which throws a lustre over the polished 
court of Charles and Philip ; but also without the 
avarice, the insatiable cruelty, and dismal supersti- 
tion which deface the bright page of their mihtary 
renown.* The Cid himself, whose authentic his- 
tory may vindicate the hyperbole of romance, was 
the heau ideal of chivalry .f 

* Sufficient evidence of this may be found in works of imagination, as 
well as the histories of the period. The plays of Lope de Vega, for in- 
stance, are filled with all manner of perfidy and assassination, which 
takes place as a matter of course, and without the least compunction. 
In the same spirit, the barbarous excesses of his countrymen in South 
America are detailed by Ercilla, in his historical epic. La Araucana. The 
flimsy pretext of conscience, for which these crimes are perpetrated, 
cannot veil their enormity from any but the eyes of the offender. 

t The veracity of the traditionary history of the Cid, indeed his exist- 



574 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

The peculiarities of early Scottish poetry may 
also be referred, in a great degree, to the political 
relatioDs of the nation, which for many centuries 
was distracted by all the rancorous dissensions inci- 
dent to the ill-balanced fabric of feudal government. 
The frequent and long regencies, always unfavour- 
able to civil concord, multiplied the sources of jeal- 
ousy, and armed with new powers the factious aris- 
tocracy. In the absence of legitimate authority, 
each baron sought to fortify himself by the increased 
number of his retainers, who, in their turn, willingly 
attached themselves to the fortunes of a chief who 
secured to them plunder and protection. Hence a 
system of clanship was organized, more perfect and 
more durable than has existed in any other country, 
which is not entirely effaced at the present day. To 
the nobles who garrisoned the Marches, still greater 
military powers were necessarily delegated for pur- 
poses of state defence, and the names of Home, 
Douglas, and Buccleuch make a far more frequent 
and important figure in national history than that of 
the reigning sovereign. Hence private feuds w^ere 
inflamed and vindicated by national antipathies, and 
a pretext of patriotism was never wanting to justify 
perpetual hostility. Hence the scene of the old 

ence, discussed and denied by Masdeu, in his HisLoria CrUica de Espana, 
has been satisfactorily established by the learned Miiller ; and the con- 
clusions of the latter writer are recently confirmed by Conde's posthu- 
mous publication of translated Arabian manuscripts of great antiquity, 
where the Cid is repeatedly mentioned as the chief known by the name 
of the Warrior, el Campeador : " the Cid whom Alia curse ;" '• the tyrant 
Cid;" "the accursed Cid," &c. See Historia de los Arahes de Espana, 
ii., 92. 



SCOTTISH SONG. 575 

ballads was laid chiefly on the borders, and hence 
the minstrels of the "North Countrie" obtained such 
pre-eminence over their musical brethren. 

The odious passion of revenge, which seems 
adapted by nature to the ardent temperaments of 
the South, but which even there has been mitigated 
by the spirit of Christianity, glowed with fierce heat 
in the bosoms of those Northern savages. An of- 
fence to the meanest individual was espoused by his 
whole clan, and was expiated, not by the blood of 
the offender only, but by that of his whole kindred. 
The sack of a peaceful castle, and the slaughter of 
its sleeping inhabitants, seem to have been as famil- 
iar occurrences to these Border heroes as the lifting 
of a drove of cattle, and attended with as little com- 
punction. The following pious invocation, uttered 
on the eve of an approaching foray, may show the 
acuteness of their moral sensibility : 

*' He that ordained us to be born, 
Sent us mair meat for the morn. 
Come by right or come by wrang, 
Christ, let us not fast owre lang, 
But blithely spend what's gaily got. 
Ride, Rowland, hough 's i' the pot." 

When superstition usurps the place of religion, 
there will be httle morality among the people. The 
only law they knew was the command of their chief, 
and the only one he admitted was his sword. " By 
what right," said a Scottish prince to a marauding 
Douglas, " do you hold these lands V " By that of 
my sword," he answered. 

From these causes the early Scottish poetry is 



576 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

deeply tinged with a gloomy ferocity, and abounds 
in details of cool, deliberate cruelty. It is true that 
this is frequently set off, as in the fine old ballads of 
Chevy Chase and Auld Maitland, by such deeds of 
rude but heroic gallantry as, in the words of Sid- 
ney, "stir the soul hke the sound of a trumpet." 
But, on the whole, although the scene of the oldest 
ballads is pitched as late as the fourteenth century, 
the manners they exhibit are not much superior, in 
point of refinement and humanity, to those of our 
own North American savages.* 

From wanton or vindictive cruelty, especially 
when exercised on the defenceless or the innocent, 
the cultivated mind naturally shrinks with horror 
and disgust ; but it was long ere the stern hearts of 
our English ancestors yielded to the soft impulses 
of mercy and benevolence. The reigns of the Nor- 
man dynasty are written in characters of fire and 
blood. As late as the conclusion of the fourteenth 
century, we find the Black Prince, the "flower of 
English knighthood," as Froissart styles him, super- 
intending the butchery of three thousand unresisting 
captives, men, women, and children, who vainly 
clung to him for mercy. The general usage of sur- 
rendering as hostages their wives and children, 
whose members were mutilated or lives sacrificed on 
the least infraction of their engagements, is a still 



* For proof of this assertion, see "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," 
and in particular the ballads of " Jellon Grame," " Young Benjie," " Lord 
William," " Duel of Wharton and Stuart," " Death of Featherstone- 
haugh," " Douglas Tragedy," &c. 



SCOTTISH SONG. 577 

better evidence of the universal barbarism of the so 
much lauded age of chivalry. 

Another trait in the old Scotch poetry, and of a 
very opposite nature from that we have been descri- 
bing, is its occasional sensibility: touches of genuine 
pathos are found scattered among the cold, appalling 
passions of the age, like the flowers which, in Switz- 
erland, are said to bloom alongside the avalanche. 
No state of society is so rude as to extinguish the 
spark of natural affection; tenderness for our off- 
spring is but a more enlarged selfishness, perfectly 
compatible with the utmost ferocity towards others. 
Hence scenes of parental and iiUal attachment are 
to be met with in these poems which cannot be read 
without emotion. The passion of love appears to 
have been a favourite study with the ancient Eng- 
lish writers, and by none, in any language we have 
read, is it managed with so much art and feeling as 
by the dramatic writers of dueen Elizabeth's day. 
The Scottish minstrels, with less art, seem to be en- 
titled to the praise of possessing an equal share of 
tenderness. In the Spanish ballad love glows with 
the fierce ardour of a tropical sun. The amorous 
serenader celebrates the beauties of his Zayda (the 
name which, from its frequency, would seem to be a 
general title for a Spanish mistress) in all the florid 
hyperbole of Oriental gallantry, or, as a disappoint- 
ed lover, wanders along the banks of the Guadalete, 
imprecating curses on her head and vengeance on 
his devoted rival. The calm dejection and tender 
melancholy which are diffused over the Scottish 

4D 



578 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

love-songs are far more affecting than all this turbu- 
lence of passion. The sensibility which, even in a 
rude age, seems to have characterized the Scottish 
maiden, was doubtless nourished by the solemn com- 
plexion of the scenery by which she was surround- 
ed, by the sympathies continually awakened for her 
lover in his career of peril and adventure, and by 
the facilities afforded her for brooding over her mis- 
fortunes in the silence of rural solitude. 

To similar physical causes may be principally re- 
ferred those superstitions which are so liberally dif- 
fused over the poetry of Scotland down to the pres- 
ent day. The tendency of wild, solitary districts, 
darkened with mountains and extensive forests, to 
raise in the mind ideas of solemn, preternatural awe, 
has been noticed from the earliest ages. " Where is 
a lofty and deeply-shaded grove," writes Seneca, in 
one of his epistles, " filled with venerable trees, 
whose interlacing boughs shut out the face of heav- 
en, the grandeur of the wood, the silence of the 
place, the shade so dense and uniform, infuse into 
the breast the notion of a divinity ;" and thus the 
speculative fancy of the ancients, always ready to 
supply the apparent void of nature, garrisoned each 
grove, fountain, or grotto, with some local and tute- 
lary genius. These sylvan deities, clothed with cor- 
poreal figures, and endowed with mortal appetites, 
were brought near to the level of humanity ; but the 
Christian revelation, which assures us of another 
world, is the " evidence of things unseen," and, while 
it dissipates the gross and sensible creations of class- 



SCOTTISH SONG. 579 

ic mythology, raises our conceptions to the spiritual 
and the infinite. In our eager thirst for communi- 
cation with the world of spirits, we naturally ima- 
gine it can only be through the medium of spirits 
like themselves, and, in the vulgar creed, these appa- 
ritions never come from the abodes of the blessed, 
but from the tomb, where they are supposed to await 
the period of a final and universal resurrection, and 
whence they are allowed to " revisit the glimpses of 
the moon," for penance or some other inscrutable 
purpose. Hence the gloomy, undefined character 
of the modern apparition is much more appalling 
than the sensual and social personifications of anti- 
quity. 

The natural phenomena of a wild, uncultivated 
country greatly conspire to promote the illusions of 
the fancy. The power of clouds to reflect, to dis- 
tort, and to magnify objects is well known, and on 
this principle many of the preternatural appearances 
in the German mountains and the Scottish High- 
lands, whose lofty summits and unreclaimed valleys 
are shrouded in clouds and exhalations, have been 
ingeniously and philosophically explained. The 
solitary peasant, as the shades of evening close 
around him, witnesses with dismay the gathering 
phantoms, and, hurrying home, retails his adventures 
with due amplification. What is easily believed is 
easily seen, and the marvellous incident is soon pla- 
ced beyond dispute by a multitude of testimonies. 
The appetite, once excited, is keen in detecting 
other visions and prognostics, which as speedily cir- 



580 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

culate through the channels of rustic tradition, until 
in time each glen and solitary heath has its un- 
earthly visitants, each family its omen or boding 
spectre, and superstition, systematized into a sci- 
ence, is expounded by indoctrinated wizards and 
gifted seers. 

In addition to these fancies, common, though in a 
less degree, to other nations, the inhabitants of the 
North have inherited a more material mythology, 
w^hich has survived the elegant fictions of Greece 
and Rome, either because it vs^as not deemed of suf- 
ficient importance to provoke the arm of the Church, 
or because it was too nearly accommodated to the 
moral constitution of the people to be thus easily 
eradicated. The character of a mythology is always 
intimately connected with that of the scenery and 
climate in which it is invented. Thus the graceful 
Nymphs and Naiads of Greece ; the Peris of Persia, 
who live in the colours of the rainbow, and on the 
odours of flowers ; the Fairies of England, who in 
airy circles "dance their ringlets to the whistling 
wind," have the frail gossamer forms and dehcate 
functions congenial with the beautiful countries 
which they inhabit ; while the Elves, Bogles, Brown- 
ies, and Kelpies, which seem to have legitimately de* 
scended, in ancient Highland verse, from the Scan- 
dinavian Dvergar, Nisser, &c., are of a stunted and 
malignant aspect, and are celebrated for nothing bet- 
ter than maiming cattle, bewildering the benighted 
traveller, and conjuring out the souls of newborn 
infants. Within the memory of the present genera- 



SCOTTISH SONG. 581 

tion, very well authenticated anecdotes of these 
ghostly kidnappers have been circulated and greed- 
ily credited in the Scottish Highlands. But the 
sunshine of civihzation is rapidly dispelling the lin- 
gering mists of superstition. The spirits of darkness 
love not the cheerful haunts of men, and the bustling 
activity of an increasing, industrious population al- 
lows brief space for the fears or inventions of fancy. 
The fierce aspect of the Scottish ballad was mit- 
igated under the general tranquillity which followed 
the accession of James to the united crowns of Eng- 
land and Scotland, and the Northern muse might 
have caught some of the inspiration which fired her 
Southern sister at this remarkable epoch, had not 
the fatal prejudices of her sovereign in favour of an 
English or even a Latin idiom diverted his ancient 
subjects from the cultivation of their own. As it 
was, Drummond of Hawthornden, whose melodious 
and melancholy strains, however, are to be enrolled 
among Enghsh verse, is the most eminent name 
which adorns the scanty annals of this reign. The 
civil and rehgious broils, which, by the sharp con- 
cussion they gave to the Enghsh intellect during the 
remainder of this unhappy century, seemed to have 
forced out every latent spark of genius, served only 
to discourage the less polished muse of the North. 
The austerity of the reformers chilled the sweet 
flow of social song, and the only verse in vogue was 
a kind of rude satire, sometimes pointed at the hcen- 
tiousness of the Roman clergy, and sometimes at the 
formal affectation of the Puritans, but which, from 



582 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the coarseness of the execution, and the transitory 
interest of its topics, has for the most part been con- 
signed to a decent oblivion. 

The Revolution in 1688, and the subsequent 
union of the two kingdoms, bj the permanent assu- 
rance they gave of civil and religious liberty, and, 
lastly, the establishment of parochial schools about 
the same period, by that wide diffusion of intelh- 
gence among the lower orders which has elevated 
them above every other European peasantry, had a 
most sensible influence on the moral and intellectual 
progress of the nation. Improvements in art and 
agriculture were introduced; the circle of ideas w^as 
expanded, and the feelings liberalized by a free 
communication with their southern neighbours, and 
religion, resigning much of her austerity, lent a pru- 
dent sanction to the hilarity of social intercourse. 
Popular poetry naturally reflects the habits and pre- 
vailing sentiments of a nation. The ancient notes 
of the border trumpet were exchanged for the cheer- 
ful sounds of rustic revelry ; and the sensibility which 
used to be exhausted on subjects of acute but pain- 
ful interest, now celebrated the temperate pleasures 
of domestic happiness, and rational though romantic 
love. 

The rustic glee, which had put such mettle into 
the compositions of James the First and Fifth, those 
royal poets of the commonalty, as they have been 
aptly styled, was again renewed ; ancient songs, pu- 
rified from their original vices of sentiment or dic- 
tion, were revived ; new ones were accommodated 



SCOTTISH SONG. 583 

to ancient melodies ; and a revolution was gradually 
effected in Scottish verse, w^liich experienced little 
variation during the remainder of the eighteenth 
century. The existence of a national music is es- 
sential to the entire success of lyrical poetry. It 
may be said, indeed, to give wings to song, which, 
in spite of its imperfections, is thus borne along from 
one extremity of the nation to the other, with a ra- 
pidity denied to many a nobler composition. 

Thus aUied, verse not only represents the present, 
but the past ; and while it invites us to repose or to 
honourable action, its tones speak of joys which are 
gone, or wake in us the recollections of ancient 
glory. 

It is impossible to trace the authors of a large por- 
tion of the popular lyrics of Scotland, which, like its 
native wild-flowers, seem to have sprung up sponta- 
neously in the most sequestered sohtudes of the 
country. Many of these poets, even, who are famil- 
iar in the mouths of their own countrymen, are bet- 
ter known south of the Tweed by the compositions 
which, under the title of "Scottish Melodies," are 
diligently thrummed by every miss in her teens, than 
by their names ; while some few others, as Ramsay, 
Ferguson, &c., whose independent tomes maintain 
higher reputation, are better known by their names 
than their compositions, which, much applauded, are, 
we suspect, but little read. 

The union of Scotland with England was unpro- 
pitious to the language of the former country; at 
least, it prevented it from attaining a classical per- 



584 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

fection, which some, perhaps, may not regret, as be- 
ing in its present state a better vehicle for the popu- 
lar poetry, so consonant with the genius of the na- 
tion. Under Edward the First the two nations 
spoke the same language, and the formidable epics 
of Barbour and Blind Harry, his contemporaries, 
are cited by Warton as superior models of English 
versification. After the lapse of five centuries, the 
Scottish idiom retains a much greater affinity with 
the original stock than does the English; but the 
universal habit with the Scotch of employing the 
latter in works of taste or science, and of rehnquish- 
ing their own idiom to the more humble uses of the 
people, has degraded it to the unmerited .condition 
of a provincial dialect. Few persons care to be- 
stow much time in deciphering a vocabulary which 
conceals no other treasures than those of popular 
fancy and tradition. 

A genius hke Burns certainly may do, and doubt- 
less has done, much to diffuse a knowledge and a 
rehsh for his native idiom. His character as a poet 
has been too often canvassed by writers and biog- 
raphers to require our panegyric. We define it, 
perhaps, as concisely as may be, by saying, that it 
consisted of an acute sensibility, regulated by un- 
common intellectual vigour. Hence his frequent 
visions of rustic love and courtship never sink into 
mawkish sentimentality, his quiet pictures of do- 
mestic life are without insipidity, and his mirth is 
not the unmeaning ebullition of animal spirits, but is 
pointed with the reflection of a keen observer of hu- 



SCOTTISH SONG. 685 

man nature. This latter talent, less applauded in 
him than some others, is in our opinion his most 
eminent. Without the grace of La Fontaine, or the 
broad buffoonery of Berni, he displays the same fa- 
cility of illuminating the meanest topics, seasons his 
humour with as shrewd a moral, and surpasses both 
in a generous sensibility, which gives an air of truth 
and cordiality to all his sentiments. Lyrical poetry 
admits of less variety than any other species ; and 
Burns, from this circumstance, as well as from the 
flexibility of his talents, may be considered as the 
representative of his whole nation. Indeed, his uni- 
versal genius seems to have concentrated within it- 
self the rays which were scattered among his prede- 
cessors : the simple tenderness of Crawford, the 
fidelity of Ramsay, and careless humour of Ferguson. 
The Doric dialect of his country was an instrument 
pecuharly fitted for the expression of his manly and 
unsophisticated sentiments. But no one is more in- 
debted to the national music than Burns : embalm- 
ed in the sacred melody, his songs are familiar to us 
from childhood, and, as we read them, the silver 
sounds with which they have been united seem to 
linger in our memory, heightening and prolonging 
the emotions which the sentiments have excited. 

Mr. Cunningham, to whom it is high time we 
should turn, in some prefatory reflections on the 
condition of Scottish poetry, laments exceedingly 
the improvements in agriculture and mechanics, the 
multiplication of pursuits, the wider expansion of 

4E 



586 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

knowledge, which have taken place among the peas- 
antry of Scotland during the present century. 

" Change of condition, increase of knowledge," 
says he, " the calling in of machinery to the aid of 
human labour, and the ships which whiten the ocean 
with their passing and repassing sails, wafting luxu- 
ries to our backs and our tables, are all matters of 
delight to the historian or the pohtician, but of sor- 
row to the poet, who delights in the primitive glory 
of a people, and contemplates with pain all changes 
which lessen the original vigour of character, and 
refine mankind till they become too sensitive for en- 
joyment. Man has now to labour harder and long- 
er to shape out new ways to riches, and even 
bread, and feel the sorrows of the primeval curse, a 
hot and sweaty brow, more frequently and more se- 
verely than his ancestors. All this is uncongenial to 
the creation of song, where many of our finest songs 
have been created, and to its enjoyment, where it 
was long and fondly enjoyed, among the peasantry 
of Scotland." — Preface, 

These circumstances certainly will be a matter 
of delight to the historian and politician, and we 
doubt if they afford any reasonable cause of lamen- 
tation to the poet. An age of rudeness and igno- 
rance is not the most propitious to a flourishing con- 
dition of the art, which indulges quite as much in 
visions of the past as the present, in recollections as 
in existing occupations ; and this is not only true of 
civiUzed, but of ruder ages : the forgotten bards of 
the Niebelungen and the Heldenbuch, of the roman- 



SCOTTISH SONG. 587 

ces of Arthur and of Charlemagne, looked back 
through the vista of seven hundred years for their 
subjects, and the earliest of the Border minstrelsy 
celebrates the antique feuds of a preceding century. 
On the other hand, a wider acquaintance with spec- 
ulative and active concerns may be thought to open 
a bolder range of ideas and illustrations to the poet. 
Examples of this may be discerned among the Scot- 
tish poets of the present age ; and if the most emi- 
nent, as Scott, Campbell, Joanna BaiUie, have de- 
serted their natural dialect and the humble themes 
of popular interest for others better suited to their 
aspiring genius, and for a language which could dif- 
fuse and perpetuate their compositions, it can hardly 
be matter for serious reproach even with their own 
countrymen. But this is not true of Scott, who has 
always condescended to illuminate the most rugged 
and the meanest topics relating to his own nation, 
and who has revived in his " Minstrelsy" not merely 
the costume, but the spirit of the ancient Border 
muse of love and chivalry. 

In a similar tone of lamentation, Mr. Cunning- 
ham deprecates the untimely decay of superstition 
throughout the land. But the seeds of superstition 
are not thus easily eradicated ; its grosser illusions, 
indeed, may, as we have before said, be scattered by 
the increasing light of science ; but the principal 
difference between a rude and a civiUzed age, at 
least as regards poetical fiction, is that the latter re- 
quires more skill and plausibility in w^orking up the 
materiel than the former. The witches of Macbeth 



588 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

are drawn too broadly to impose on the modern 
spectator, as they probably did on the credulous age 
of Queen Bess ; but the apparition in Job, or the 
Bodach Glas in Waverley, is shadowed with a dim 
and mysterious portraiture, that inspires a solemn 
interest sufficient for the purposes of poetry. The 
philosophic mind may smile with contempt at pop- 
ular fancies, convinced that the general experience 
of mankind contradicts the existence of apparitions ; 
that the narratives of them are vague and ill authen- 
ticated ; that they never or rarely appeal to more 
than one sense, and that the most open to illusion ; 
that they appear only in moments of excitement, 
and in seasons of solitude and obscurity ; that they 
come for no explicable purpose, and effect no per- 
ceptible result ; and that, therefore, they may in ev- 
ery case be safely imputed to a diseased or a deluded 
imagination. But if, in the midst of these solemn 
musings, our philosopher's candle should chance to 
go out, it is not quite certain that he w'ould continue 
to pursue them with the same stoical serenity. In 
short, no man is quite so much a hero in the dark as 
in broad daylight, in solitude as in society, in the 
gloom of the churchyard as in the blaze of the 
drawing-room. The season and the place may be 
such as to oppress the stoutest heart with a myste- 
rious awe, which, if not fear, is near akin to it. We 
read of adventurous travellers, who, through a sleep- 
less night, have defied the perilous nonentities of a 
haunted chamber, and the very interest we take in 
their exploits proves that the superstitious principle 



SCOTTISH SONG. 589 

is not wholly extinguished in our own bosoms. So, 
indeed, do the mysterious inventions of Mrs. Rad- 
cliffe and her ghostly school ; of our own Brown, in 
a most especial manner ; and Scott, ever anxious to 
exhibit the speculative as well as practical character 
of his countrymen, has more than once appealed to 
the same general principle. Doubtless few in this 
enlightened age are disposed boldly to admit the 
existence of these spiritual phenomena ; but fewer 
still there are who have not enough of superstitious 
feeling lurking in their bosoms for all the purposes 
of poetical interest. 

Mr. Cunningham's work consists of four volumes 
of lyrics, in a descending series from the days of 
Queen Mary to our own. The more ancient, after 
the fashion of Burns and Ramsay, he has varnished 
over with a colouring of diction that gives greater 
lustre to their faded beauties, occasionally restoring 
a mutilated member, which time and oblivion had 
devoured. Our author's prose, consisting of a co- 
pious preface and critical notices, is both florid and 
pedantic ; it continually aspires to the vicious affec- 
tation of poetry, and explains the most common sen- 
timents by a host of illustrations and images, thus 
perpetually reminding us of the children's play of 
*' What is it hke V As a poet, his fame has long 
been established, and the few original pieces which 
he has introduced into the present collection have 
the ease and natural vivacity conspicuous in his for- 
mer compositions. We will quote one or two, which 
we presume are the least familiar to our readers : 



590 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

" A wet sheet and a flowing sea, 

A wind that follows fast, 
And fills the white and rustling sail, 

And bends the gallant mast ! 
And bends the gallant mast, my boys, 

While, like the eagle free, 
Away the good ship flies, and leaves 

Old England on the lea. 

" for a soft and gentle wind ! 

I heard a fair one cry ; 
But give to me the swelling breeze, 

And white waves heaving high ; 
And white waves heaving high, my lads, . 

The good ship tight and free ; 
The world of waters is our home, 

And merry men are we. 

" There's tempest in yon horned moon, 

And lightning in yon cloud ; 
And hark the music, mariners ! 

The wind is wakening loud. 
The wind is wakening loud, my boys. 

The lightning flashes free ; 
The hollow oak our palace is. 

Our heritage the sea." — ^Vol. iv., p. 208. 

This spirited water-piece, worthy of Campbell, is 
one evidence among others of the tendency of the 
present improved condition of the Scottish peasantry 
to expand the beaten circle of poetical topics and 
illustrations. The following is as pretty a piece of 
fairy gossamer as has been spun out of this skepti- 
cal age : 

" SONG OF THE ELFIN MILLER. 

"Full merrily rings the millstone round, 

Full merrily rings the wheel, 
Full merrily gushes out the grist — 

Come, taste my fragrant meal. 
As sends the lift its snowy drift. 

So the meal comes in a shower ; 
Work, fairies, fast, for time flies past — 

I borrow'd the mill an hour. 



SCOTTISH SONG. 591 

" The miller he's a worldly man, 

And maun hae double fee ; 
So draw the sluice of the churl's dam, 

And let the stream come free. 
Shout, fairies, shout ! see, gushing out, 

The meal comes like a river ; 
The top of the grain on hill and plain 

Is ours, and shall be ever. 
*' One elf goes chasing the wild bat's wing, 

And one the white owl's horn ; 
One hunts the fox for the white o' his tail, 

And we winna hae him till morn. 
One idle fay, with the glow-worm's ray, 

Runs glimmering 'mang the mosses ; 
Another goes tramp wi' the will-o-wisp's lamp, 

To light a lad to the lasses. 

" haste, my brown elf, bring me corn 

From bonnie Blackwood plains 
Go, gentle fairy, bring me grain 

From green Dalgonar mains ; I 

But, pride of a' at Closeburn ha', j 

Fair is the corn and fatter ; ( 

Taste, fairies, taste, a gallanter grist < 

Has never been wet with water. \ 

" Hilloah ! my hopper is heaped high ; 'I 

Hark to the well-hung wheels ! >{ 

They sing for joy ; the dusty roof 

It clatters and it reels. I. 

Haste, elves, and turn yon mountain burn — |i 

Bring streams that shine like siller ; i 

The dam is down, the moon sinks soon, I 

And I maun grind my meller. 
" Ha ! bravely done, my wanton elves, 

That is a foaming stream ; 
See how the dust from the mill-ee flies. 

And chokes the cold moon-beam. 
Haste, fairies, fleet come baptized feet. 

Come sack and sweep up clean, 
And meet me soon, ere sinks the moon, 

In thy green vale, Dalveen." — Vol. iv., p. 327. 

The last we can afford is a sweet, amorous effu- 
sion, in the best style of the romantic muse of the 



592 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Lowlands. It has before found a place in the " Niths- 
dale and Gallowaj" collection : 

" Thou hast vow'd by thy faith, my Jeanie, 

By that pretty white hand of thine, 
And by all the lowing stars in heaven 

That thou wouldst aye be mine ; 
And I have sworn by my faith, my Jeanie, 

And by that kind heart of thine. 
By all the stars sown thick o'er heaven, 

That thou shalt aye be mine. 

" Foul fa' the hands wad loose sic bands 

And the heart wad part sic love ; 
But there's nae hand can loose the band 

But the finger of Him above. 
Though the wee wee cot maun be my bield 

And my clothing e'er sae mean, 
I should lap me up rich in the faulds of love 

Heaven's armfu' of my Jean. 

" Thy white arm wad be a pillow to me, 

Far softer than the down. 
And Love wad winnow o'er us his kind, kind wings 

And sweetly we'd sleep and soun'. 
Come here to me, thou lass whom I love, 

Come here and kneel wi' me, 
The morning is full of the presence of God, 

And I cannot pray but thee. 
" The wind is sweet amang the new flowers, 

The wee birds sing saft on the tree. 
Our goodman sits in the bonnie sunshine, 

And a blithe old bodie is he ; 
The Beuk maun be ta'en when he comes hame, 

Wi' the holie psalmodie, 
And I will speak of thee when I pray. 

And thou maun speak of me." — Vol. iv., p. 308. 

Our readers may think we have been detained too 
long by so humble a theme as old songs and ballads ; 
yet a wise man has said, " Give me the making of 
the ballads, and I care not who makes the laws of a 
nation." Indeed, they will not be lightly regarded 



SCOTTISH SONG. 593 

by those who consider then* influence on the char- 
acter of a simple, susceptible people, particularly 
in a rude age, when they constitute the authentic 
records of national history. Thus the wandering 
minstrel kindles in his unlettered audience a gener- 
ous emulation of the deeds of their ancestors, and 
while he sings the bloody feuds of the Zegris and 
Abencerrages, the Percy and the Douglas, artfully 
fans the flame of an expiring hostility. Under these 
animating influences, the ancient Spaniard and the 
Border warrior displayed that stern military enthu- 
siasm which distinguished them above every other 
peasantry in Europe. Nor is this influence altogeth- 
er extinguished in a polite age, when the narrow at- 
tachments of feudal servitude are ripened into a 
more expanded patriotism ; the generous principle is 
nourished and invigorated in the patriot by the sim- 
ple strains which recount the honourable toils, the 
homebred joys, the pastoral adventures, the roman- 
tic scenery, which have endeared to him the land of 
his fathers. There is no moral cause which oper- 
ates more strongly in infusing a love of country into 
the mass of the people than the union of a national 
music with popular poetry. 

But these productions have an additional value in 
the eyes of the antiquarian to what is derived from 
their moral or political influence, as the repertory of 
the motley traditions and superstitions that have de- 
scended for ages through the various races of the 
North. The researches of modern scholars have 
discovered a surprising affinity between the ancient 

4F 



594 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

Scottish ballad and the Teutonic, Scandinavian, and 
even Calmuck romance. Some of the most eminent 
of the old Border legends are almost literal versions 
of those which inflamed the martial ardour of our 
Danish ancestors."^ A fainter relationship had be- 
fore been detected between them and Southern and 
Oriental fable. Thus, in a barbarous age, when the 
nearest provinces of Europe had but a distant inter- 
course with each other, the electric spark of fancy 
seems to have run around the circle of the remotest 
regions, animating them with the same wild and ori- 
ginal creations. 

Even the lore of the nursery may sometimes as- 
cend to as high an antiquity. The celebrated Whit- 
tington and his Cat can display a Teutonic pedigree 
of more than eight centuries ; " Jack, commonly 
called the Giant Killer, and Thomas Thumb," says 
an antiquarian writer, " landed in England from the 
very same keels and war-ships which conveyed 
Hengist and Horsa, and Ebba the Saxon ;" and the 
nursery-maid who chants the friendly monition to 
the "Lady-bird," or narrates the "fee-faw-fum" ad- 
venture of the carnivorous giant, little thinks she has 
purloined the stores of Teutonic song and Scandi- 
navian mythology .f The ingenious Blanco White, 

* Such are "The Childe of Elle," "Catharine and Janfarie," " Cos- 
patric," "Willie's Lady," &c. 

" Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, 
Your house is on fire, your children will roam." 

This fragment of a respectable little poem has soothed the slumbers 
of the German infant for many ages. The giant who so cunningly scent- 
ed the "blood of an Englishman" is the counterpart of the personage 



SCOTTISH SONG. 595 

who, under the name of Doblado, has thrown great 
light on the character and condition of modern 
Spain, has devoted a chapter to tracing out the ge- 
nealogies of the games and popular pastimes of his 
country. Something of the same kind might be at- 
tempted in the untrodden walks of nursery litera- 
ture. Ignorance and youth are satisfied at no great 
cost of invention. The legend of one generation 
answers, with little variation, for the next, and, with- 
in the precincts of the nursery, obtains that imper- 
ishable existence which has been the vain boast of 
many a loftier lyric. That the mythology of one 
age should be abandoned to the "Juvenile Cabinet" 
of another, is indeed curious. Thus the doctrines 
most venerated by man in the infancy of society be- 
come the sport of infants in an age of civihzation, 
furnishing a pleasing example of the progress of the 
human intellect, and a plausible colouring for the 
dream of perfectibility. 

recorded in the collection of Icelandic mythology made by Snorro in the 
thirteenth century.— -Ec^da, Fable 23. 



596 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



DA POxNTE'8 OBSERVATIONS.* 

JULY, 1825. 

The larger part of the above work is devoted to 
strictures upon an article on " Italian Narrative Po- 
etry," w^hich appeared in October, 1824. The au- 
thor is an eminent ItaHan teacher at New- York. 
His poetical abilities have been highly applauded in 
his own country, and were rewarded with the office 
of Csesarean poet at the court of Vienna, w here he 
acquired new laurels as successor to the celebrated 
Metastasio. His various fortunes in hterary and 
fashionable hfe while in Europe, and the eccentrici- 
ties of his enthusiastic character, furnish many in- 
teresting incidents for an autobiography, published 
by him two years since at New- York, and to this 
we refer those of our readers who are desirous of a 
more intimate acquaintance with the author. 

We regret that our remarks, which appeared to 
us abundantly encomiastic of Itahan letters, and 
which certainly proceeded from our admiration for 
them, should have given such deep offence to the 
respectable author of the " Osservazioni," as to com- 
pel him, although a " veteran" in literature, to arm 
himself against us in defence of his " calumniated" 
country. According to him, " we judge too lightly 
of the Itahans, and quote as axioms the absurd opin- 

* "Alcune Osservazioni sull' Articulo Quarto publicato nel North 
American Review, il Mese d'Ottobre dell' Anno 1824. Da L. Da Ponte. 
Nuova-Jorca. Stampatori Gray e Bunce." 1825. 



DA ponte's observations. 597 

ions of their insane rivals (accaniti rivali), the 
French. We conceal some things w^here silence 
has the appearance of malice ; we expose others 
which common generosity should have induced us 
to conceal ; we are guilty of false and arbitrary ac- 
cusations, that do a grievous wrong to the most 
tender and most compassionate of nations ; we are 
wanting in a decent reverence for the illustrious men 
of his nation ; finally, we pry with the eyes of Argus 
into the defects of Italian literature, and with one 
eye only, and that, indeed, half shut (anche quello 
socchiuso), into its particular merits." It is true, this 
sour rebuke is sweetened once or twice with a com- 
pliment to the extent of our knowledge, and a " con- 
fession that many of our reasonings, facts, and re- 
flections merit the gratitude of his countrymen ; that 
Qur intentions were doubtless generous, praisewor- 
thy,'* and the like ; but such vague commendations, 
besides that they are directly inconsistent with some 
of the imputations formerly alleged against us, are 
too thinly scattered over sixty pages of criticism to 
mitigate very materially the severity of the censure. 
The opinions of the author of the Osservazioni on 
this subject are undoubtedly entitled to great respect ; 
but it may be questioned whether the excitable tem- 
perament usual with his nation, and the local par- 
tiality which is common to the individuals of every 
nation, may not have led him sometimes into extrav- 
ao-ance and error. This seems to us to have been 
the case ; and as he has more than once intimated 
the extreme difficulty of forming a correct estimate 



598 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of a foreign literature, " especially of the Italian," we 
shall rely exclusively for the support of our opinions 
on the authorities of his own countrymen, claiming 
one exception only in favour of the industrious Gin- 
guene, whose opinions he has himself recommended 
to " the diligent study of all who would form a cor- 
rect notion of Itahan literature."* 

His first objection is against what he considers 
the unfair view which we exhibited of the influence 
of Italy on English letters. This influence, we had 
stated, was most perceptible under the reign of Eliz- 
abeth, but had gradually declined during the suc- 
ceeding century, and, with a few exceptions, among 
whom we cited Milton and Gray, could not be said 
to be fairly discerned until the commencement of 
the present age. Our censor is of a different opin- 
ion. " Instead of confining himself" (he designates 
us always by this humble pronoun) " to Milton," he 
says, " for which exception I acknowledge no obliga- 
tion to him, since few there are who were not pre- 
viously acquainted with it, I would have had him 
acknowledge that many Enghsh writers not only 
loved and admired, but studiously imitated our au- 
thors, from the time of Chaucer to that of the great 
Byron ; for the clearest evidence of which it will suf- 
fice to read the compositions of this last poet, of 
Milton, and of Gray. He then censures us for not 
specifying the obligations which Shakspeare was 

* " Ma bisognava aver Tanima di Ginguene, conoscer la lingua e la let- 
teratura Italiana, come Ginguene, e amar il vero come Ginguene, per sen- 
tire," &c. — Osservazioni, p. 115, 116. 



DA ponte's observations. 599 

under to the early Italian novelists for the plots of 
many of his pieces ; " w^hich silence" he deems " as 
little to be commended as v^^ould be an attempt to 
conceal the light, the most beautiful prerogative of 
the sun, from one who had never before seen it. 
And," he continues, " these facts should, for tw^o rea- 
sons, have been especially communicated to Amer- 
icans : first, to animate them more and more to study 
the Italian tongue ; and, secondly, in order not to 
imitate, by what may appear a malicious silence, the 
example of another nation [the French], who, after 
drawing their intellectual nourishment from us, have 
tried every method of destroying the reputation of 
their earliest masters." — P. 74-79. 

We have extracted the leading ideas diffused by 
the author of the Osservazioni over half a dozen pa- 
ges. Some of them have at least the merit of nov- 
elty. Such are not, however, those relating to Chau- 
cer, whom we beheve no one ever doubted to have 
found in the Tuscan tongue — the only one of that 
rude age in which 

"The pure well-head of poesie did dwell"— 

one principal source of his premature inspiration. 
We acknowledged that the same sources nourished 
the genius of Clueen Elizabeth's writers, among 
whom we particularly cited the names of Surrey, 
Sidney, and Spenser. And if we did not distin- 
guish Shakspeare amid the circle of contemporary 
dramatists whom we confessed to have derived the 
designs of many of their most popular plays from 
Italian models, it was because we did not think the 



600 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

extent of his obligations, amounting to half a dozen 
imperfect skeletons of plots, required any such spe- 
cification ; more especially as several of his great 
minor contemporaries, as Fletcher, Shirley, and oth- 
ers, made an equally liberal use of the same mate- 
rials. The obligations of Shakspeare, such as they 
were, are, moreover, notorious to every one. The 
author of the Osservazioni expressly disclaims any 
feehngs of gratitude towards us for mentioning those 
of Milton, because they were notorious. It is really 
very hard to please hiaL The literary enterprise 
which had been awakened under the reign of Ehza- 
beth was in no degree diminished under her suc- 
cessor ; but the intercourse with Italy, so favourable 
to it at an earlier period, was, for obvious reasons, at 
an end. A Protestant people, but lately separated 
from the Church of Rome, would not deign to resort 
to what they believed her corrupt fountains for the 
sources of instruction. The austerity of the Puritan 
was yet more scandalized by the voluptuous beauties 
of her lighter compositions, and Milton, whose name 
we cited in our article, seems to have been a solitary 
exception on the records of that day, of an eminent 
English scholar thoroughly imbued with a relish for 
ItaKan letters. 

After the days of civil and religious faction had 
gone by, a new aspect was given to things under the 
brilliant auspices of the Restoration. The French 
language was at that time in the meridian of its 
glory. Boileau, with an acute but pedantic taste, 
had draughted his critical ordinances from the most 



DA ponte's observations. 601 

perfect models of classical antiquity. Racine, work- 
ing on these principles, may be said to have put into 
action the poetic conceptions of his friend Boileau ; 
and, with such a model to illustrate the excellence of 
his theory, it is not wonderful that the code of the 
French legislator, recommended, as it was, too, by 
the patronage of the most imposing court in Europe, 
should have found its way into the rival kingdom, 
and have superseded there every other foreign influ- 
ence.^ It did so. " French criticism," says Bishop 
Hurd, speaking of this period, " has carried it before 
the Italian with the rest of Europe. This dexterous 
people have found means to lead the taste, as well 
as set the fashions, of their neighbours." Again : 
" The exact but cold Boileau happened to say some- 
thing of the clinquant of Tasso, and the magic of 
this word, hke the report of Astolfo's horn in Arios- 
to, overturned at once the soUd and well-built found- 
ation of Italian poetry : it became a sort of watch- 
word among the critics." Mr. Gifford, whose ac- 
quaintance with the ancient literature of his nation 
entitles him to perfect confidence on this subject, 
whatever we may be disposed to concede to him on 
some others, in his introduction to Massinger re- 
marks, in relation to this period, that " criticism, 
which in a former reign had been making no incon- 

* Boileau's sagacity in fally appreciating the merits of Phedre and of 
Athalie, and his independence in supporting them against the fashionable 
factions of the day, are well known. But he conferred a still greater ob- 
ligation on his friend. Racine the younger tells us that " his father, in 
his youth, was given to a vicious taste (conce/h), and that Boileau led him 
back to nature, and taught him to rhyme with labour {rimer dijicil erne yit).'" 

A G 



602 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

siderable progress under the great masters of Italy, 
was now diverted into a new channel, and only 
studied under the puny and jejune canons of their 
degenerate followers, the French." Pope and Ad- 
dison, the legislators of their own and a future age, 
cannot be exempted from this reproach. The latter 
conceived and published the most contemptuous 
opinion of the Italians. In a very early paper of 
the Spectator bearing his own signature (No. 6), he 
observes, " The finest writers among the modern 
Italians [in contradistinction to the ancient Romans] 
express themselves in such a florid form of words, 
and such tedious circumlocutions, as are used by 
none but pedants in our own country, and at the 
same time fill their writings with such poor imagi- 
nations and conceits as our youths are ashamed of 
before they have been two years at the University." 
In the same paper he adds, "I entirely agree with 
Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Virgil is worth 
all the tinsel of Tasso." This is very unequivocal 
language, and our censor will do us the justice to 
believe that we do not quote it from any " malicious 
intention," but simply to show what must have been 
the popular taste, when sentiments like these were 
promulgated by a leading critic of the day, in the 
most important and widely-circulated journal in the 
kingdom."^ 

* Addison tells us, in an early number of the Spectator, that three thou- 
sand copies were daily distributed ; and Chalmers somewhere remarks, 
that this circulation was afterward increased to fourteen thousand ; an 
amount, in proportion to the numerical population and intellectual culture 
of that day, very far superior to that of the most popular journals at the 
present time. 



DA ponte's observations. 603 

In conformity with this anti-Itahan spirit, we find 
that no translation of Ariosto was attempted subse- 
quent to the very imperfect one by Harrington in 
EUzabeth's time. In the reign of George the Sec- 
ond a new version was pubhshed by one Huggins. 
In his preface he observes, " After this work was 
pretty far advanced, I was informed there had been 
a translation published in the reign of Ehzabeth, and 
dedicated to that queen; whereupon I requested a 
friend to obtain a sight of that book, for it is, it seems, 
very scarce, and the glorious original much more so 
in this country." Huggins was a learned scholar, 
although he made a bad translation. Yet it seems 
he had never met with, or even heard of, the version 
of his predecessor Harrington. But, without encum- 
bering ourselves with authorities, a glance at the 
compositions of the period in question would show 
how feeble are the pretensions of an Italian influence, 
and we are curious to know what important names, 
or productions, or characteristics can be cited by the 
author of the Osservazioni in support of it. Dryden, 
whom he has objected to us, versified, it is true, 
three of his Fables from Boccaccio ; but this brief 
effort is the only evidence we can recall, in the mul- 
titude of his miscellaneous writings, of a respect for 
Italian letters, and he is well known to have power- 
fully contributed to the introduction of a French 
taste in the drama. The only exception w hich oc- 
curs to our general remark is that afforded by the 
Metaphysical School of Poets, whose vicious pro- 
pensities have been referred by Dr. Johnson to Ma- 



604 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

rini and his followers. But as an ancient English 
model for this affectation may be found in Donne, 
and as the doctor was not prodigal of golden opin- 
ions towards Italy, we will not urge upon our oppo- 
nent what may be deemed an ungenerous, perhaps 
an unjust imputation. The same indifference ap- 
pears to have lasted the greater portion of the eigh- 
teenth century, and with few exceptions, enumerated 
in our former article, the Tuscan spring seems to 
have been almost hermetically sealed against the 
English scholar. The increasing thirst for every 
variety of intellectual nourishment in our age has 
again invited to these early sources, and while every 
modern tongue has been anxiously explored by the 
diligence of critics, the Italian has had the good for- 
tune to be more widely and more successfully culti- 
vated than at any former period. 

We should apologize to our readers for afflicting 
them with so much commonplace detail, but we 
know no other way of rebutting the charge, which, 
according to the author of the Osservazioni, might 
be imputed to us, of a " malicious silence" in our ac- 
count of the influence of Italian letters in England. 

But if we have offended by saying too little on 
the preceding head, we have given equal offence on 
another occasion by saying too much ; our antago- 
nist attacks us from such opposite quarters that we 
hardly know where to expect him. We had spo- 
ken, and in terms of censure, of Boileau's celebrated 
sarcasm upon Tasso ; and we had added that, not- 
withstanding an affected change of opinion, "he ad- 



DA ponte's observations. 605 

hered until the time of his death to his original her- 
esy." "As much," says our censor, "as it would 
have been desirable in him [the reviewer] to have 
spoken on these other matters, so it would have been 
equally proper to have suppressed all that Boileau 
wrote upon Tasso, together with the remarks made 
by him in the latter part of his life, as having a ten- 
dency to prejudice unfavourably the minds of such 
as had not before heard them. Nor should he have 
coldly styled it his ' original heresy ;' but he should 
have said that, in spite of all the heresies of Boileau 
and all the blunders of Voltaire, the Jerusalem has 
been regarded for more than two centuries and a 
half, and will be regarded, as long as the earth has 
motion, by all the nations of the civilized world, as 
the most noble, most magnificent, most subhme epic 
produced for more than eighteen centuries ; that 
this consent and this duration of its splendour are 
the strongest and most authentic seal of its incontro- 
vertible merit ; that this unlucky clinquant ^ that de- 
faces at most a hundred verses of this poem, and 
which, in fact, is nothing but an excess of over- 
wrought beauty, is but the merest flaw in a mount- 
ain of diamonds ; that these hundred verses are com- 
pensated by more than three thousand, in which are 
displayed all the perfection, grace, learning, elo- 
quence, and colouring of the loftiest poetry." In the 
same swell of conimendation the author proceeds 
for half a page farther. We know not what inad- 
vertence on our part can have made it necessary, by 
way of reproof to us, to pour upon Tasso's head such 



606 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

a pelting of pitiless panegyric. Among all the Ital- 
ian poets, there is no one for whom we have ever 
felt so sincere a veneration, after 

" quel signer dell' altissimo canto 
Che sovra gli altri, com' aquila vola," 

as for Tasso. In some respects he is even superior 
to Dante. His writings are illustrated by a purer 
morality, as his heart was penetrated with a more 
genuine spirit of Christianity. Oppression, under 
which they both suffered the greater part of their 
lives, wrought a very different effect upon the gentle 
character of Tasso and the vindictive passions of 
the Ghibelline. The religious wars of Jerusalem, 
exhibiting the triumphs of the Christian chivalry, 
were a subject peculiarly adapted to the character 
of the poet, who united the qualities of an accom- 
plished knight with the most unaffected piety. The 
vulgar distich, popular in his day with the common 
people of Ferrara, is a homely but unsuspicious tes- 
timony to his opposite virtues.^ His greatest fault 
was an ill-regulated sensibility, and his greatest mis- 

* " Colla penna e colla spada, 

Nessun val quanto Torquato." 

This elegant couplet was made in consequence of a victory obtained 
by Tasso over three cavaliers, who treacherously attacked him in one of 
the public squares of Ferrara. His skill in fencing is notorious, and his 
passion for it is also betrayed by the frequent, circumstantial, and mas- 
terly pictures of it in his "Jerusalem." See, in particular, the mortal 
combat between Tancred and Argante, can. xix., where all the evolutions 
of the art are depicted with the accuracy of a professed sword-player. 
In the same manner, the numerous and animated allusions to field-spofts 
betray the favourite pastime of the author of Waverley ; and the falcon, 
the perpetual subject of illustration and simile in the '• Divina Comme- 
dia," might lead us to suspect a similar predilection in Dante. 



DA ponte's observations. 607 

fortune was to have been thrown among people who 
knew not how to compassionate the infirmities of 
genius. In contemplating such a character, one 
may, without affectation, feel a disposition to draw a 
veil over the few imperfections that tarnished it, and 
in our notice of it, expanded into a dozen pages, 
there are certainly not the same number of lines de- 
voted to his defects, and those exclusively of a liter- 
ary nature. This is but a moderate allowance for 
the transgressions of any man ; yet, according to 
Mr. Da Ponte, " we close our eyes against the merits 
of his countrymen, and pry with those of Argus into 
their defects." 

But why are we to be debarred the freedom of 
criticism enjoyed even by the ItaHans themselves] 
To read the Osservazioni, one w^ould conclude that 
Tasso, from his first appearance, had united all suf- 
frages in his favour; that, by unanimous acclama- 
tion, his poem had been placed at the head of all 
the epics of the last eighteen centuries, and that the 
only voice raised against him had sprung from the 
petty rivalries of French criticism, from w hich source 
we are more than once complimented with having 
recruited our own forces. Does our author reckon 
for nothing the reception with which the first acad- 
emy in Italy greeted the Jerusalem on its introduc- 
tion into the world, when they would have smother- 
ed it with the kindness of their criticism 1 Or the 
volumes of caustic commentary by the celebrated 
Galileo, almost every line of which is a satire 1 Or, 
to descend to a later period, when the lapse of more 



608 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

than a century may be supposed to have rectified 
the caprice of contemporary judgments, may we not 
shelter ourselves under the authorities of Andres,* 
whose favourable notice of Itahan letters our author 
cites with deference ; of Metastasio, the avowed ad- 
mirer and eulogist of Tasso ;f of Gravina, whose 
philosophical treatise on the principles of poetry, a 
work of great authority in his own country, exhibits 
the most ungrateful irony on the literary pretensions 
of Tasso, almost refusing to him the title of a poet} 
But, to proceed no farther, we may abide by the 
solid judgment of Ginguene, that second Daniel, 
whose opinions we are advised so strenuously " to 
study and to meditate." " As to florid images, friv- 
olous thoughts, affected turns, conceits, and Jeux de 
mots, they are to be found in greater abundance in 
Tasso's poem than is commonly imagined. The 
enumeration of them would be long, if one should 
run over the Jerusalem and cite all that could be 
classed under one or other of these heads, &c. Let 
us content ourselves with a few examples." He 
then devotes ten pages to these few examples (our 
author is indignant that we should have bestowed as 
many lines), and closes with this sensible reflection : 
" I have not promised a blind faith in the writers I 
admire the most ; I have not promised it to Boileau, 
I have not promised it to Tasso; and in hterature 
we aU owe our faith and homage to the eternal laws 
of truth, of nature, and of taste."§ 

* Deir Origine, &c., d'Ogni Lett., torn, iv., p. 250. 

t Opere Postume di Metastasio, torn, iii , p. 30. 

% Ragion Poetica, p. 161, 162. ^ Tom. v., p. 368, 378. 



DA PONTE S OBSERVATIONS. 609 

But, in order to relieve Tasso from an undue re- 
sponsibility, we had stated in our controverted arti- 
cle that "the affectations imputed to him were to be 
traced to a much more remote origin;" that "Pe- 
trarch's best productions were stained with them, as 
were those of preceding poets, and that they seem- 
ed to have flowed directly from the Provencjale, the 
fountain of Itahan lyric poetry." This transfer of 
the sins of one poet to the door of another is not a 
whit more to the approbation of our censor, and he 
not only flatly denies the truth of our remark, as ap- 
phed to " Petrarch's best productions," but gravely 
pronounces it " one of the most solemn, the most 
horrible literary blasphemies that ever proceeded 
from the tongue or pen of mortal !"* " I maintain," 
says he, " that not one of those that are truly Pe- 
trarch's best productions, and there are very many, 
can be accused of such a defect ; let but the critic 
point me out a single atlected or vicious expression 
in the three patriotic Canzoni, or in the Chiare 
fresclie e dolci acque, or in the Tre Sorelle,'' &c. (he 
names several others), " or, in truth, in any of the 
rest, excepting one or two only." He then recom- 
mends to us that, " instead of hunting out the errors 
and blemishes of these masters of our intellects, and 
occupying ourselves with unjust and unprofitable 
criticism, we should throw over them the mantle of 
gratitude, and recompense them with our eulogiums 

* " Diro essere questa una delle piu solenni, delle piu orribili letterarie 
bestemmie, che sia stata mai pronunziata o scritta da lingua o penna 
mortale."— P. 94. 

4H 



610 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

and applause." In conformity with which, the au- 
thor proceeds to pour out his grateful tribute on the 
head of the ancient laureate for two pages farther, 
but which, as not material to the argument, we must 
omit. 

^Ye know no better way of answering all this 
than by taking up the gauntlet thrown down to us, 
and we are obliged to him for giving us the means 
of bringing the matter to so speedy an issue. We 
will take one of the first Canzoni, of which he has 
challenged our scrutiny. It is in Petrarch's best 
manner, and forms the first of a series, which has 
received Kar' k^oxnv, the title of the Three Sisters 
(Tre Sorelle). It is indited to his mistress's eyes, 
and the first stanza contains a beautiful invocation 
to these sources of a lover's inspiration ; but in the 
second we find him relapsing into the genuine Pro- 
vencale heresy : 

" When I become snoic before their burning rays. 
Your noble pride 

Is perhaps offended with my unworthiness. 
Oh ! if this my apprehension 
Should not temper the flame that consumes me, 
Happy should I be to dissolve ; since in their presence 
It is dearer to me to die than to live without them. 
Then, that I do not melt, 
Being so frail an object, before so potent afire, 
It is not my own strength which saves me from it, 
But principally fear, 

Which congeals the blood wandering through my veins. 
And mends the heart that it may hum a long time.'"* 

" Quando agli ardenti rai neve divegno ; 
Vostro gentile sdegno 
Forse eh' allor mia indegnitate offende. 
0, se questa tem.enza 



DA PONTE S OBSERVATIONS. 611 

This melancholy parade of cold conceits, of fire 
and snow, thawing and freezing, is extracted, he it 
observed, from one of those choice productions 
which is recommended as without a blemish; in- 
deed, not only is it one of the best, but it was es- 
teemed by Petrarch himself, together with its two 
sister odes, the very best of his lyrical pieces, and 
the decision of the poet has been ratified by poster- 
ity. Let it not be objected that the spirit of an ode 
must necessarily evaporate in a prose translation. 
The ideas may be faithfully transcribed, and we 
would submit it to the most ordinary taste whether 
ideas like those above quoted can ever be ennobled 
by any artifice of expression. 

We think the preceding extract from one of the 
" best of Petrarch's compositions" may sufficiently 
vindicate us from the imputation of unprecedented 
" blasphemy" on his poetical character ; but, lest an 
appeal be again made, on the ground of a diversity 
in national taste, we will endeavour to fortify our 
feeble judgment with one or two authorities among 
his own countrymen, whom Mr. Da Ponte may be 
more inclined to admit. 

The Italians have exceeded every other people in 

Non temprasse 1' arsura che m' incende ; 

Beato venir men ! che 'n lor presenza 

M' e piu caro il morir, che '1 viver senza. 

Dunque ch' i' non mi sfaccia, 

Si frale oggetto a si possente foco, 

Non e proprio valor, che me ne scampi ; 

Ma la paura un poco, 

Che '1 sangue vago per le vene agghiaccia, 

Risalda '1 cor, perche piu tempo avvam.pi." 

Canzone vii., nelV Edizione di Muralori. 




612 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

the grateful tribute of commentaries which they have 
paid to the writings of their eminent men ; some of 
these are of extraordinary value, especially in verbal 
criticism, while many more, by the contrary lights 
which they shed over the path of the scholar, serve 
rather to perplex than to enhghten it.* Tassoni and 
Muratori are accounted among the best of Petrarch's 
numerous commentators, and the latter, in particu- 
lar, has discriminated his poetical character with as 
much independence as feeling. We cannot refrain 
from quoting a few lines from Muratori's preface, as 
exceedingly pertinent to our present purpose : "Who, 
I beg to ask, is so pedantic, so blind an admirer of 
Petrarch, that he will pretend that no defects are to 
be found in his verses, or, being found, will desire they 
should he respected ivith a religious silence ? What- 
ever may be our rule in regard to moral defects, 
there can be no doubt that, in those of art and sci- 
ence, the public interest requires that truth should 
be openly unveiled, since it is important that all 
should distinguish the beautiful from the bad, in or- 
der to imitate the one and to avoid the other/'f In 

* A single ode has furnished a repast for a volume. The nuniber of 
Petrarch's commentators is incredible ; no less than a dozen of the most 
eminent Italian scholars have been occupied with annotations upon him 
at the same time. Dante has been equally fortunate. A noble Floren- 
tine projected an edition of a hundred volumes for the hundred cantos 
of the " Commedia," which should embrace the different illustrations. 
One of the latest of the fraternity, Biagioli, in an edition of Dante, pub- 
lished at Paris, 1818, not only claims for his master a foreknowledge of 
the existence of America, but of the celebrated Harveian discovery of the 
circulation of the blood ! — Tom. i., p. 18, note. After this, one may feel 
les3 surprise at the bulk of these commentaries. 

t Le Rime di F. Petrarca ; con le Osservazioni di Tassoni, Muzio, e 
Muratori. Pref, p. ix. 



DA PONTE S OBSERVATIONS. 613 

the same tone speaks Tiraboschi, torn, v., p. 474. 
Yet more to the purpose is an observation of the 
Abbe Denina upon Petrarch, " who," says he, " not 
only in his more ordinary sonnets affords obvious ex- 
amples of affectation and coldness, but in his most 
tender and ynost beautiful compositions approaches 
the conceited and inflated style of which I am now 
speaking.""^ And the " impartial Ginguene," a name 
we love to quote, confesses that " Petrarch could not 
deny himself those puerile antitheses of cold and 
heat, of ice and flames, which occasionally disfigure 
his most interesting and most agreeable 'pieces!' \ It 
would be easy to marshal many other authorities of 
equal weight in our defence, but obviously superflu- 
ous, since those we have adduced are quite compe- 
tent to our vindication from the reproach, somewhat 
severe, of having uttered " the most horrible blas- 
phemy which ever proceeded from the pen of mor- 
tal." 

The age of Petrarch, like that of Shakspeare, 
must be accountable for his defects, and in this man- 
ner we may justify the character of the poet where 
we cannot that of his compositions. The Proven- 
cale, the most poHshed European dialect of the Mid- 
die Ages, had reached its last perfection before the 
fourteenth century. Its poetry, chiefly amatory and 
lyrical, may be considered as the homage offered by 
the high-bred cavaliers of that day at the shrine of 
beauty, and, of whatever value for its literary execu- 

* Vicende della Letteratura, torn, ii., p. 55. 
t Hist. Lit., torn ii., p. 566. 



614 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tion, is interesting for the beautiful grace it diffuses 
over the iron age of chivalry. It was, as we have 
said, principally devoted to love ; those who did not 
feel could at least affect the tender passion ; and 
hence the influx of subtle metaphors and frigid con- 
ceits, that give a meretricious brilliancy to most of 
the Provenqale poetry. The fathers of Italian verse, 
Guido, Cino, &c., seduced by the fashion of the pe- 
riod, clothed their own more natural sentiments in 
the same vicious forms of expression ; even Dante, 
in his admiration, often avowed for the Trouba- 
dours, could not be wholly insensible to their influ- 
ence ; but the less austere Petrarch, both from con- 
stitutional temperament and the accidental circum- 
stances of his situation, was more deeply affected by 
them. In the first place, a pertinacious attachment 
to a mistress whose heart was never warmed, al- 
though her vanity may have been gratified by the 
adulation of the finest poet of the age, seems to have 
maintained an inexplicable control over his affec- 
tions, or his fancy, during the greater portion of his 
life. In the amatory poetry of the ancients, polluted 
with coarse and hcentious images, he could find no 
model for the expression of this sublimated passion. 
But the Platonic theory of love had been imported 
into Italy by the fathers of the Church, and Petrarch, 
better schooled in ancient learning than any of his 
contemporaries, became early enamoured of the spec- 
ulative doctrines of the Greek philosophy. To this 
source he was indebted for those abstractions and 
visionary ecstasies which sometimes give a generous 



DA PONTE S OBSERVATIONS. 615 

elevation, bat very often throw a cloud over his con- 
ceptions. And again, an intimate faraiharity w^ith 
the Provenqale poetry was the natural consequence 
of his residence in the south of France. There, too, 
he must often have been a spectator at those meta- 
physical disputations in the courts of love, which ex- 
hibited the same ambition of metaphor, studied an- 
tithesis, and hyperbole, as the written compositions 
of Provence. To all these causes may be referred 
those defects which, under favour be it spoken, oc- 
casionally offend us, even " in his most perfect com- 
positions." The rich finish which Petrarch gave to 
the Tuscan idiom has perpetuated these defects in 
the poetry of his country. Decipit exemplar vitiis 
imitahile. His beauties were inimitable, but to copy 
his errors was in some measure to tread in his foot- 
steps, and a servile race of followers sprang up in 
Italy, who, under the emphatic name of Petrarchists, 
have been the object of derision or applause, as a 
good or a bad taste predominated in their country. 
Warton, with apparent justice, refers to the same 
source some of the early corruptions in English po- 
etry ; and Petrarch — we hope it is not " blasphemy" 
to say it — becomes, by the very predominance of his 
genius, eminently responsible for the impurities of 
diction which disfigure some of the best productions 
both in English literature and his own. 

We trust that the free manner in which we have 
spoken will not be set down by the author of the 
Osservazioni to a malicious desire of " calumniating" 
the literature of his country. We have been neces- 



616 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

sarilj led to it in vindication of our former asser- 
tions. After an interval of nearly five centuries, the 
dispassionate voice of posterity has awarded to Pe- 
trarch the exact measure of censure and applause. 
We have but repeated their judgment No one of 
the ilkistrious triumvirate of the fourteenth century 
can pretend to have possessed so great an influence 
over his own age and over posterity. Dante, sacri- 
ficed by a faction, was, as he pathetically complains, 
a wandering mendicant in a land of strangers; Boc- 
caccio, with the interval of a few years in the me- 
ridian of his life, passed from the gayety of a court 
to the seclusion of a cloister ; but Petrarch, the 
friend, the minister of princes, devoted, during the 
whole of his long career, his w^ealth, his wide au- 
thority, and his talents, to the generous cause of 
philosophy and letters. He was unwearied in his 
researches after ancient manuscripts, and from the 
most remote corners of Italy, from the obscure re- 
cesses of churches and monasteries, he painfully col- 
lected the mouldering treasures of antiquity. Many 
of them he copied with his own hand — among the 
rest, all the works of Cicero ; and his beautiful tran- 
script of the epistles of the Roman orator is still pre- 
served in the Laurentian library at Florence. In 
his numerous Latin compositions he aspired to re- 
vive the purity and elegance of the Augustan age, 
and, if he did not altogether succeed in the attempt, 
he may claim the merit of having opened the soil 
for the more successful cultivation of later Italian 
scholars. 



DA ponte's observations. 617 

His own efforts, and the generous impulse which 
his example communicated to his age, have justly 
entitled him to be considered the restorer of classical 
learning. His greatest glory, however, is derived 
from the spirit of life which he breathed into mod- 
ern letters. Dante had fortified the Tuscan idiom 
with the vigour and severe simplicity of an ancient 
language, but the graceful genius of Petrarch was 
wanting to ripen- it into that harmony of numbers 
which has made it the most musical of modern dia- 
lects. His knowledge of the Proven^ale enabled 
him to enrich his native tongue with many foreign 
beauties ; his exquisite ear disposed him to refuse all 
but the most melodious combinations ; and, at the 
distance of five hundred years, not a word in him 
has become obsolete, not a phrase too quaint to be 
used. Voltaire has passed the same high eulogium 
upon Pascal ; but Pascal lived three centuries later 
than Petrarch. It would be difficult to point out 
the writer who so far fixed the enea Tirepdsvra; we 
certainly could not assign an earlier period than the 
commencement of the last century. Petrarch's bril- 
liant success in the Italian led to most important 
consequences all over Europe by the evidence which 
it afforded of the capacities of a modern tongue. Pie 
relied, however, for his future fame on his elaborate 
Latin compositions, and, while he dedicated these 
to men of the highest rank, he gave away his Italian 
lyrics to ballad-mongers, to be chanted about the 
streets for their own profit. His contemporaries 
authorized this judgment, and it was for his Latin 

41 



618 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

eclogues, and his epic on Scipio Africanus, that he 
receiv ed the laurel wreath of poetry in the Capitol. 
But nature must eventually prevail over the decis- 
ions of pedantry or fashion. By one of those fluc- 
tuations, not very uncommon in the history of let- 
ters, the author of the Latin ''Africa is now known 
only as the lover of Laura and the father of Italian 
song. 

We have been led into this long, we fear tedious 
exposition of the character of Petrarch, partly from 
the desire of defending the justice of our former crit- 
icism against the heavy imputations of the author of 
the Osservazioni, and partly from reluctance to dwell 
only on the dark side of a picture so brilliant as that 
of the laureate, who, in a barbarous age, with 

" his rhetorike so swete 
Enluminid all Itaile of poetrie." 

Our limits will compel us to pass hghtly over 
some less important strictures of our author. 

About the middle of the last century a bitter con- 
troversy arose between Tiraboschi and Lampillas, a 
learned but intemperate Spaniard, respecting which 
of their two nations had the best claim to the re- 
proach of having corrupted the other's literature in 
the sixteenth century. In alluding to it, we had re- 
marked that " the ItaUan had the better of his ad- 
versary in temper, if not in argument." The author 
of the Osservazioni styles this " a dry and dogmatic 
decision, which so much displeased a certain Italian 
letterato that he had promised him a confutation of 
it." We know not who the indignant letterato may 



DA PONTE S OBSERVATIONS. 619 

be whose thunder has been so long hanging over us, 
but we must say that, so far from a " dogmatic decis- 
ion," if ever we made a circumspect remark in our 
lives, this was one. As far as it went, it was com- 
plimentary to the Italians ; for the rest, we waived 
all discussion of the merits of the controversy, both 
because it was impertinent to our subject, and be- 
cause we were not sufficiently instructed in the de- 
tails to go into it. One or two reflections, however, 
we may now add. The relative position of Italy 
and Spain, political and literary, makes it highly 
probable that the predominant influence, of what- 
ever kind it may have been, proceeded from Italy. 
1. She had matured her literature to a high perfec- 
tion while that of every other nation was in its in- 
fancy, and she was, of course, much more likely to 
communicate than to receive impressions. 2. Her 
political relations with Spain were such as particu- 
larly to increase this probability in reference to her. 
The occupation of an insignificant corner of her 
own territory (for Naples was very insignificant in 
eveiy literary aspect) by the house of Aragon open- 
ed an obvious channel for the transmission of her 
opinions into the sister kingdom. 3. Any one, even 
an Itahan, at all instructed in the Spanish literature, 
will admit that this actually did happen in the reign 
of Charles the Fifth, the golden age of Italy; that 
not only, indeed, the latter country influenced, but 
changed the whole complexion of Spanish letters, 
establishing, through the intervention of her high- 
priests, Boscan and Garcilaso, what is universally 



620 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

recognised under the name of an Italian school. 
This was an era of good taste ; but when, only fifty 
years later, both languages were overrun with those 
deplorable affectations which, in Italy particularly, 
have made the very name of the century (seicentd) 
a term of reproach, it would seem probable that the 
same country, which but so short a time before had 
possessed so dkect an influence over the other, 
should through the same channels have diffused the 
poison with which its own literature was infected. 
As Marini and Gongora, however, the reputed found- 
ers of the school, were contemporaries, it is ex- 
tremely difficult to adjust the precise claims of eitlier 
to the melancholy credit of origin ahty, and, after all, 
the question to foreigners can be one of little inter- 
est or importance. 

Much curiosity has existed respecting the source 
of those affectations which, at different periods, have 
tainted the modern languages of Europe. Each na- 
tion is ambitious of tracing them to a foreign origin, 
and all have at some period or other agreed to find 
this in Italy. From this quarter the French critics 
derive their style precieux, which disappeared before 
the satire of Moliere and Boileau; from this the 
English derive their metaphysical school of Cowley ; 
and the cuUismo, of which we have been speaking, 
which Lope and Quevedo condemned by precept, 
but authorized by example, is referred by the Span- 
iards to the same source. The early celebrity of 
Petrarch and his vicious imitators may afford a spe- 
cious justification of all this ; but a generous criti- 



DA ponte's observations. 621 

cism may perhaps be excused in referring them to a 
more ancient origin. The Proven(?ale for three cen- 
tmies was the most popular, and, as ^Ye have before 
said, the most poUshed dialect in Europe. The lan- 
guage of the people all along the fertile coasts of the 
Mediterranean, it was also the language of poetry in 
most of the polite courts in Europe ; in those of 
Toulouse, Provence, Sicily, and of several in Italy; it 
reached its highest perfection under the Spanish no- 
bles of Aragon ; it passed into England in the twelfth 
century with the dowry of Eleanor of Guienne and 
Poictou ; even kings did not disdain to cultivate it, 
and the lion-hearted Richard, if report be true, could 
embelhsh the rude virtues of chivalry with the mild- 
er glories of a Troubadour.* When this precocious 
dialect had become extinct, its influence still remain- 
ed. The early Italian poets gave a sort of classical 
sanction to its defects; but while their genius may 
thus, with justice, be accused of scattering the seeds 
of corruption, the soil must be confessed to have 
been universally prepared for their reception at a 
more remote period. 

Thus the metaphysical conceits of Cowley's 

* Every one is acquainted with Sismondi's elegant treatise on the 
Provengale poetry. It cannot, however, now be relied on as of the high- 
est authority. The subject has been much more fully explored since the 
publication of his work by Monsieur Raynouard, Secretary of the French 
Academy. His Poesies des Troi'hadours has now reached the sixth vol- 
ume ; and W. A. Schlegel, in a treatise of little bulk but great learning, 
entitled Observations sur la Langue ct la Litterature Provengale, has pro- 
nounced it, by the facts it has brought to light, to have given the coup de 
grace to the theory of Father Andres, whom Sismondi has chiefly fol- 
lowed. 



622 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

school, which Dr. Johnson has referred to Marini, 
may be traced through the poetry of Donne, of 
Shakspeare and his contemporaries, of Sarrey, Wy- 
att, and Chancer, up to the fugitive pieces of the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which have been 
redeemed from obhvion by the dihgence of the an- 
tiquarian. In the same manner, the religious and 
amatory poetry of Spain at the close of the thir- 
teenth century, as exhibited in their Cancioneros, 
displays the same subtleties and barbaric taste for 
ornament, from which few of her writers, even in 
the riper season of her literature, have been wholly 
uncontaminated. Perhaps the perversities of Voi- 
ture and of Scudery may find as remote a genealogy 
in France. The coiTuptions of the Pleiades may 
afford one link in the chain, and any one who has 
leisure might verify our suggestions. Almost every 
modern hterature seems to have contained, in its 
earliest germs, an active principle of corruption. 
The perpetual lapses into barbarism have at times 
triumphed over all efforts of sober criticism ; and the 
perversion of intellect, for the greater part of a cen- 
tury, may furnish to the scholar an ample field for 
humiliating reflection. How many fine geniuses in 
the condemned age of the seicentisti, wandering after 
the false lights of Marini and his school, substituted 
cold conceits for wit, puns for thoughts, and wire- 
drawn m^etaphors for simplicity and nature ! How 
many, with Cowley, exhausted a genuine wit in 
hunting out remote analogies and barren combina- 
tions ; or with Lope, and even Calderon, devoted 



DA ponte's observations. 623 

pages to curious distortions of rhyme, to echoes or 
acrostics, in scenes which invited all the eloquence 
of poetry ! Prostitutions of genius like these not 
merely dwarf the human mind, but carry it back 
centuries to the scholastic subtleties, the alliterations, 
anagrams, and thousand puerile devices of the Mid- 
dle Ages. 

But we have already rambled too far from the au- 
thor of the " Osservazioni." Our next rock of of- 
fence is a certain inconsiderate astonishment which 
we expressed at the patience of his countrymen un- 
der the infliction of epics of thirty and forty cantos 
in length ; and he reminds us of our corresponding 
taste, equally unaccountable, for novels and roman- 
ces, spun out into an interminable length, Hke those, 
for example, by the author of Waverley [p. 82 to 
85]. A liberal criticism, we are aware, will be dif- 
fident of censuring the discrepancies of national 
tastes. ^V\^iere the value of the thought is equal, the 
luxury of polished verse and poetic imagery may 
yield a great superiority to poetry over prose, par- 
ticularly with a people so sensible to melody and of 
so vivacious a fancy as the Italians; but, then, to 
accomplish all this requires a higher degree of skill 
in the artist, and mediocrity in poetry is intolerable. 

" Mediocribus esse poetis 
Non homines, non Di," &c. 

Horace's maxim is not the less true for being some- 
what stale. D'Alembert has uttered a sweeping de- 
nunciation against all long works in verse, as im- 
possible to be read through vvithout experiencing 



624 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ennui ; from which he does not except even the 
masterpieces of antiquity.^ What would he have 
said to a second-rate Itahan epic, wiredrawn into 
tiiirtj or forty cantos, of tlie incredibilia of chivahy ! 

The EngUsh novel, if tolerably well executed, may 
convey some solid instruction in its details of life, 
of human character, and of passion ; but the tales 
of chivalry — the overcharged pictures of an imagin- 
ary state of society ; of " Gorgons, hydras, and chi- 
meras dire" — can be regarded only as an intellectual 
relaxation. In a less polished dialect, and in a sim- 
pler age, they beguiled the tedious evenings of our 
unlettered Norman ancestors, and, as late as Eliza- 
beth's day, they incurred their parting malediction 
from the worthy Ascham, as " stuff for wise men to 
laugh at, whose whole pleasure standeth in open 
manslaughter and bold bawdry." The remarks in 
our article, of course, had no reference to the chef 
d'ceuvres of their romantic muse, many of^vhich we 
had been dihgently commending. It is the prerog- 
ative of genius, we all know, to consecrate whatever 
it touches. 

Some other of our general remarks seem to have 
been barbed arrows to the patriot breast of the au- 
thor of the " Osservazioni." Such are our reflec- 
tions " on the want of a moral or philosophical aim 
in the ornamental writings of the Itahans ;" on " love, 
as suggesting the constant theme and impulse to 
their poets ;" on the evil tendency of their language, 
in seducing their writers into " an overweening at- 

* CEuvres Philosophiques, &c., torn, iv., p. 153. 



DA ponte's observations. 625 

tention to sound." There are few general reflec- 
tions which have the good fortune not to require 
many, and sometimes very important exceptions. 
The physiognomy of a nation, whether moral or in- 
tellectual, must be made up of those features which 
arrest the eye most frequently and forcibly on a 
wide survey of them ; yet how many individual por- 
traits, after all, may refuse to correspond with the 
prevailing one. The Boeotians were dull to a prov- 
erb ;* yet the most inspired, in the most inspired re- 
gion of Greek poetry, was a Boeotian. The most 
amusing of Greek prose writers was a Boeotian. 
Or, to take recent examples, when we find the " ac- 
curate Ginguene" speaking of " the universal corrup- 
tion of taste in Italy during the seventeenth cen- 
tury," or Sismondi telling us that " the abuse of wit 
extinguished there, during that age, every other s^pe- 
cies of talent,'' we are obviously not to nail them 
down to a pedantic precision of language, or how 
are we to dispose of some of the finest poets and 
scholars Italy has ever produced ; of Chiabrera, Fil- 
icaja, Galileo, and other names sufficiently numerous 
to swell into a bulky quarto of Tiraboschi 1 The 
same pruning principle appUed to writers who, Hke 
Montesquieu, Madame de Stael, and Schlegel, deal 
in general views, would go near to strip them of all 
respect or credibility. 

But it is frivolous to multiply examples. Dante, 
Tasso, Alamanni, Guidi, Petrarch often, the gener- 
ous Filicaja always, with, doubtless, very many oth- 

* " Sus Bceotica, auris Bceotica, Boeoticum ingenium." 

4K 



626 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

ers, afford an honourable exception to our remark 
on the want of a moral aim in the lighter walks of 
Italian letters, and to many of these, by indirect crit- 
icism, we accorded it in our article. But let any 
scholar cast his eye over the prohfic productions of 
their romantic muse, which even Tiraboschi cen- 
sures as " crude and insipid,"* and Gravina deplores 
as having " excluded the light of truth" from his 
countrymen ;f or on their thousand tales of pleasant- 
ry and love, which, since Boccaccio's example, have 
agreeably perpetuated the ingenious inventions of a 
barbarous age ;t or round " the circle of frivolous ex- 
travagances," as Salfi§ characterizes the burlesque 
novelties wdth which the Italian wits have regaled 
the laughter-loving appetite of their nation ; or on 
their hecatombs of amorous lyrics alone, and he may 
accept, in these saturated varieties of the national 
literature, a decent apology, if not an ample justifi- 
cation for our assertion. 

* Lett. Ital., torn, vii., P. iii., s. 43. t Ragion Poetica, p. 14. 

t The Italian Novelle, it is well known, were originally suggested by 
the French Fabliaux of the 12th and 13th centuries. It may be worthy 
of remark, that, while in Italy these amusing fictions have been diligent- 
ly propagated from Boccaccio to the present day, in England, although 
recommended by a genius like Chaucer, they have scarcely been adopted 
by a single writer. The same may be said of them in France, their na- 
tive soil, with perhaps a solitary exception in the modern imitations by 
La Fontaine, himself inimitable. 

^ This learned Italian is now employed in completing the unfinished 
history of M. Ginguene. With deference to the opinions of the author 
of the " Osservazioni" (vide p. 115, 116), we think he has shown in it a 
more independent and impartial criticism than his predecessor. His 
own countrymen seem to be of the same opinion, and in a recent flat- 
tering notice of his work they have qualified their general encomium with 
more than one rebuke on the severity of his strictures. Viie Antologia 
for April, 1824. 



DA ponte's observations. 627 

But are we not to speak of " love as furnishing 
the great impulse to the Italian poet," and " as pre- 
vailing in his bosom far over every other affection 
or relation in life 1" Have not their most illustrious 
writers, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sannazarius, 
Tasso, nay, philosophic prelates like Bembo, politic 
statesmen like Lorenzo, embalmed the names of 
their mistresses in verse, until they have made them 
familiar in every corner of Italy as their own ? Is 
not nearly half of the miscellaneous selection of lyr- 
ics, in the vulgar edition of " ItaHan classics," exclu- 
sively amatory 1 Had Milton, Dryden, Pope, or, 
still more, such solid personages as Bishop Warbur- 
ton or Dr. Johnson (whose " Tetty," we suspect, 
never stirred the doctor's poetic feeUng), dedicated, 
not a passing sonnet, but whole volumes to their 
Beatrices, Lauras, and Leonoras, we think a critic 
might well be excused in regarding the tender pas- 
sion as the vivida vis of the English author. Let 
us not be misunderstood, however, as implying that 
nothing but this amorous incense escapes from the 
Italian lyric muse. To the exceptions which the 
author of the Osservazioni has enumerated, he might 
have added, had not his* modesty forbidden him, as 
inferior to none, the sacred melodies which adorn 
his own autobiography ; above all, the magnificent 
canzone on the " Death of Leopold," which can de- 
rive nothing from our commendation, when a critic 
like Mathias has declared it to have "secured to its 
author a place on the Italian Parnassus, by the side 
of Petrarch and Chiabrera."* 

* A letter from Mr. Mathias, which fell into our hands some time 



628 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

As to our remark on the tendency of the soft Ital- 
ian tones " to seduce their writers into an overween- 
ing attention to sound," we are surprised that this 
should have awakened two such grave pages of ad- 
monition from our censor. Why, we were speak- 
ing of 

'' The Tuscan's siren tongue, 
That music in itself, whose sounds are song." 

We thought the remark had been as true as it was 
old. We cannot but think there is something in it, 
even now, as w^e are occasionally lost in the mellif- 
luous redundances of Bembo or Boccaccio, those 
celebrated models of Italian eloquence. At any rate, 
our remark fell far short of the candid confession of 
Bettinelli, who, in speaking of historical writing, ob- 
serves that " in this, as in every other department of 
literature, his countrymen have been more solicitous 
about style, and ingenious turns of thought, than 
utility or good philosophy."* 

But we must hasten to the last, not by any means 
the least offence recorded on the roll of our enormi- 
ties. This is an ill-omened stricture on the poetical 
character of Metastasio, for which the author of the 
Osservazioni, after lavishing upon him a shower of 
golden compliments at our expense, proceeds to cen- 
sure us as " wanting in respect to this famous man ; 
as perspicacious only in detecting blemishes ; as 

since, concludes a complimentary analysis of the above canzone with 
this handsome eulogium : "After having read and reflected much on this 
wonderful production, I believe that, if Petrarch could have heard it, he 
would have assigned to its author a seat very near to his own, vrithout 
requiring any other evidence of his vivacious, copious, and sublime 
genius." * Risorg. d'ltalia Introduz., torn, i., p. 14. 



DA ponte's observations. 629 

guilty of extravagant and iinv^orthy expressions, 
w^liich prove that v^^e cannot have read or digested 
the works of this exalted dramatist, nor those of his 
biographers, nor of his critics." — P. 98-111. And 
what, think you, gentle reader, invited these unsa- 
voury rebukes, with the dozen pages of panegyrical 
accompaniment on his predecessor 1 " The melo- 
dious rhythm of Tasso's verse has none of the monot- 
onous siveetness so cloying in Metastasio!^ In this 
italicised line lies the whole of our offending; no 
more. 

We shall consult the comfort of our readers by 
disposing of this point as briefly as possible. We 
certainly do not feel, and we will not aflect, that 
profound veneration for Metastasio which the author 
of the Osservazioni professes, and which may have 
legitimately descended to him with the inheritance 
of the Csesarean laurel. We have always looked 
upon his operas as exhibiting an effeminacy of sen- 
timent, a violent contrivance of incident, and an ex- 
travagance of character, that are not wholly to be 
vindicated by the constitution of the Musical Drama. 
But nothing of ail this was intimated in our unfor- 
tunate suggestion ; and as we are unwilling to star- 
tle anew the principles or prejudices of our highly 
respectable censor, we shall content ourselves with 
bringing into view one or two stout authorities, be- 
hind whom we might have intrenched ourselves, 
and resign the field to him. 

The author has presented his readers with an ab- 
stract of about forty pages of undiluted commenda- 



630 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tion on his favourite poet, by the Spaniard Arteaga. 
We have no objection to this ; but, while he recom- 
mends them as the opinions of" a learned, judicious, 
and indubitably impartial critic," we think it would 
have been fair to temper these forty pages of com- 
mendation with some allusion to iive-and- thirty pa- 
ges of almost unmitigated censure which immediate- 
ly follow them.* In the course of this censorious 
analysis, it may be noticed that the " impartial Arte- 
aga," speaking of the common imputation of monot- 
ony in the structure of Metastasis s verse, and of his 
periods, far from acquitting him, expressly declines 
passing judgment upon it. 

But we may find ample countenance for our " ir- 
reverent opinion" in that of Ugo Foscolo, a name 
of high consideration both as a poet and a critic, 
and whom, for his perspicacity in the latter vocation, 
our author, on another occasion, has himself cited 
and eulogized as his " magnus Apollo." Speaking 
incidentally of Metastasio, he observes : " To please 
the court of Vienna, the musicians, and the public 
of his day, and to gratify the delicacy of his own 
feminine taste, Metastasio has reduced his language 
and versification to so limited a number of loords, 
phrases, and cadences, that they seem always the same, 
and in the end produce only the effect of a flute, 
which conveys rather delightful melody than quick 
and distinct sensations."! To precisely the same 
effect speaks W. A. Schlegel, in his eighth lecture 

* Le Rivoluzioni del Teatro Musicale, &c., p. 375-410. 
t Essays on Petrarch, p. 93. 



DA ponte's observations. 631 

on Dramatic Literature, whose acknowledged excel- 
lence in this particular department of criticism may 
induce us to quote him, although a foreigner. These 
authorities are too pertinent and explicit to require 
the citation of any other, or to make it necessary, 
by a prolix but easy enumeration of extracts from 
the poet, more fully to estabUsh our position. 

*' Hie aliqiiid plus 
Quam satis est." 

We believe we are quite as weary as our readers 
of the very disagreeable office of dweUing on the de- 
fects of a literature so beautiful, and for which we 
feel so sincere an admiration, as the ItaUan. The 
severe impeachment made, both upon the spirit and 
the substance of our former remarks, by so accom- 
plished a scholar as the author of the Osservazioni, 
has necessarily compelled us to this course in self- 
defence. The tedious parade of citations must be 
excused by the necessity of buoying up our opinions 
in debatable matters of taste by those w^hose author- 
ity alone our censor is disposed to admit — that of 
his own countrymen. He has emphatically repeat- 
ed his distrust of the capacity of foreigners to decide 
upon subjects of hterary taste ; yet the extraordi- 
nary diversity of opinion manifest between him and 
those eminent authorities whom we have quoted 
might lead us to anticipate but little correspondence 
in the national criticism. An acquaintance with 
Italian history will not serve to diminish our suspi- 
cions ; and the feuds which, from the learned but 
querulous scholars of the fifteenth century to those 



632 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of our own time, have divided lier republic of letters, 
have not been always carried on with the bloodless 
weapons of scholastic controversy.^ 

That some assertions too unqualified, some errors 
or prejudices should have escaped, in the course of 
fifty or sixty pages of remark, is to be expected from 
the most circumspect pen ; but a benevolent critic, 
instead of fastening upon these, will embrace the 
spirit of the whole, and by this interpret and excuse 
any specific inaccuracy. It may not be easy to 
come up to the standard of our author's principles, 
it may be his partialities, in estimating the intellect- 
ual character of his country ; but we think we can 
detect one source of his dissatisfaction wdth us, in 
his misconception of our views, which, according to 
him, were, that " a particular knowledge of the Ital- 
ian should be widely diffused in America." This he 
quotes and requotes with peculiar emphasis, object- 
ing it to us as perfectly inconsistent with our style 
of criticism. Now, in the first place, we made no 
such declaration. We intended only to give a ve- 
racious analysis of one branch of Italian letters. But, 
secondly, had such been our desigu, we doubt ex- 
ceedingly, or, rather, we do not doubt, whether the 
best way of effecting it would be by indiscriminate 

* Take two familiar examples : that of Caro and that of Marini. The 
adversary of the former poet, accused of murder, heresy, &c., was con- 
demned by the Inquisition, and compelled to seek his safety in exile. 
The adversary of Marini, in an attempt to assassinate him, fortunately 
shot only a courtier of the King of Sardinia. In both cases, the wits of 
Italy, ranged under opposite banners, fought with incredible acrimony 
during the greater part of a century. The subject of fierce dispute, in 
both instances, was a sonnet ! 



DA ponte's observations. 633 

panegyric. The amplification of beauties, and the 
prudish conceahnent of all defects, would carry with 
it an air of insincerity that must dispose the mind 
of every ingenuous reader to reject it. Perfection 
is not the lot of humanity more in Italy than else- 
where. Such intemperate panegyric is, moreover, 
unworthy of the great men who are the objects of 
it. They really shine with too brilhant a light to 
be darkened by a few spots ; and to be tenacious of 
their defects is in some measure to distrust their 
genius. Rien n'est heau, que le vrai, is the familiar 
reflection of a critic, whose general maxims in his 
art are often more sound than their particular appli- 
cation. 

Notwithstanding the difficulty urged by Mr. Da 
Ponte of forming a correct estimate of a foreign lan- 
guage, the science of general literary criticism and 
history, which may be said to have entirely grow^n 
up within the last fifty years, has done much to erad- 
icate prejudice and enlarge the circle of genuine 
knowledge. A century and a half ago, "the best 
of EngUsh critics,"* in the opinion of Pope and Dry- 
den, could institute a formal examination, and, of 
course, condemnation of the plays of Shakspeare "by 
the practice of the ancients.'' The best of French 
critics,! in the opinion of every one, could condemn 
the " Orlando Furioso" for wandering from the rules 

* " The Tragedies of the last Age, considered and examined by the 
practice of the Ancients," &c. By Thomas Rymer. London, 1678. 

t "Dissertation Critique sur I'Aventure de Joconde." CEuvres de 
Boileau, tom. ii. 

4L 



634 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

of Horace ; even Addison, in his triumphant vindi- 
cation of the " Paradise Lost," seems most soUcitous 
to prove its conformity w^ith the laws of Aristotle ; 
and a writer like Lope de Vega felt obliged to apol- 
ogize for the independence with which he deviated 
from the dogmas of the same school, and adapted his 
beautiful inventions in the drama to the peculiar 
genius of his own countrymen.* The magnificent 
fables of Ariosto and Spencer were stigmatized as 
harharous, because they were not classical; and the 
polite scholars of Europe sneered at " the bad taste 
which could prefer an 'Ariosto to a Virgil, a Ro- 
mance to an lUad.' "f But the reconciling spirit of 
modern criticism has interfered ; the character, the 
wants of different nations and ages have been con- 
sulted ; from the local beauties peculiar to each, the 
philosophic inquirer has deduced certain general 
principles of beauty applicable to all ; petty national 
prejudices have been extinguished ; and a difference 
of taste, which for that reason alone was before 

•'p' "Arte de hacer Comedias." Obras Sueltas, torn, iv., p. 406. 
Y quando he de escribir una Comedia, 
Encierro los preceptos con $eis Haves ; 
Saco a Terencio y Plauto de mi estudio 
Para que no me den voces, que suele 
Dar gritos la verdad en libros mudos, &c. 

t See Lord Shaftesbury's "Advice to an Author ;" a treatise of great ■ 
authority in its day, but which could speak of the " Gothic Muse of 
Shakspeare, Fletcher, and Milton as lisping with stammering tongues, 
that nothing but the youth and rawness of the age could excuse !" Sir 
William Temple, with a purer taste, is not more liberal. The term 
Gothic, with these writers, is applied to much the same subjects with 
the modern term Romantic, with this difference : the latter is simply dis- 
tinctive, while the former was also an opprobrious epithet. 



DA PONTE S OBSERVATIONS. 635 

cojidemned as a deformity, is now admired as a 
beautiful variety in the order of nature. 

The EngHsh, it must be confessed, can take little 
credit to themselves for this improvement. Their 
researches in literary history amount to little in their 
own language, and to nothing in any other. War- 
ton, Johnson, and Campbell have indeed furnished 
an accurate inventory of their poetical wealth ; but, 
except it be in the limited researches of Drake and 
of Dunlop, what record have we of all their rich and 
various prose 1 As to foreign literature, while other 
cultivated nations have been developing their views 
in voluminous and valuable treatises, the EngUsh 
have been profoundly mute.* Yet for several rea- 
sons they might be expected to make the best gen- 
eral critics in the world, and the collision of their 

* The late translation of Sismondi's " Southern Europe" is the only 
one, we believe, which the English possess of a detailed literary history. 
The discriminating taste of this sensible Frenchman has been liberal- 
ized by his familiarity with the languages of the North. His knowl- 
edge, however, is not always equal to his subject, and the credit of his 
opinions is not unfrequently due to another. The historian of the " Ital- 
ian Republics" may be supposed to be at home in treating of Italian let- 
ters, and this is undoubtedly the strongest part of his work ; but in 
what relates to Spam, he has helped himself "manibus plenis" from 
Bouterwek, much too liberally, indeed, for the scanty acknowledgments 
made by him to the accurate and learned German. Page upon page is 
literally translated from him. Sismondi's work, however, is intrinsically 
valuable for its philosophical illustrations of the character of the Span- 
iards, by the peculiarities of their literature. His analysis of the na- 
tional drama, as opposed to that of Schlegel, is also extremely inge- 
nious. Is it not more sound than that of the German'? We trust that 
this hitherto untrodden field in our language will be entered before long 
by one of our own scholars, whose researches have enabled him to go 
much more extensively into the Spanish department than either of his 
predecessors. 



636 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

judgments in this matter with those of the other Eu- 
ropean scholars, might produce new and important 
resuks. 

The author of the Osservazioni has accused us of 
being too much under the influence of his enemies, 
the French (p. 112). There are slender grounds for 
this imputation. We have always looked upon this 
fastidious people as the worst general critics possible ; 
and we scarcely once alluded to their opinions in 
the course of our article without endeavouring to 
controvert them. The truth is, while they have con- 
trived their own system with infinite skill, and are 
exceedingly acute in detecting the least violation of 
it, they seem incapable of understanding why it 
should not be apphed to every other people, however 
opposite its character from their own. The conse- 
quence is obvious. Voltaire, whose elevated views 
sometimes advanced him to the level of the generous 
criticism of our own day, is by no means an excep- 
tion. His Commentaries on Corneille are filled with 
the finest reflections imaginable on that eminent poet, 
or, rather, on the French drama ; but the application 
of these same principles to the productions of his 
neighbours leads him into the grossest absurdities. 
"Addison's Cato is the only well-written tragedy in 
England." " Hamlet is a barbarous production, that 
would not be endured by the meanest populace in 
France or Italy." " Lope de Vega and Calderon 
famiharized their countrymen with all the extrava- 
gances of a gross and ridiculous drama." But the 
French theatre, modelled upon the ancient Greek, 



DA PONTE*S OBSERVATIONS. 637 

can boast " of more than twenty pieces which sur- 
pass their most admirable chef d' oeuvres, without ex- 
cepting those of Sophocles or Euripides." So in 
other walks of poetry, Milton, Tasso, Ercilla, occa- 
sionally fare no better. •' Who would dare to talk 
to Boileau, Racine, Moliere, of an epic poem upon 
Adam and Eve ! Voltaire had one additional rea- 
son for the exaltation of his native literature at the 
expense of every other : he was himself at the head, 
or aspired to be of every department in it. 

Madame de Stael is certainly an eminent excep- 
tion, in very many particulars, to the general charac- 
ter of her nation. Her defects, indeed, are rather 
of an opposite cast. Instead of the narrowness of 
conventional precept, she may be sometimes accused 
of vague and visionary theory ; instead of nice spe- 
cific details, of dealing too freely in abstract and in- 
dependent propositions. Her faults are of the Ger- 
man school, which she may have in part imbibed 
from her intimacy with their literature (no common 
circumstance with her countrymen), from her resi- 
dence in Germany, and from her long intimacy with 
one of its most distinguished scholars, who lived un- 
der the same roof with her for many years. But, 
with all her faults, she is entitled to the praise of hav- 
ing showed a more enlarged and truly philosophical 
spirit of criticism than any of her countrymen. 

The English have never yielded to the arbitrary 
legislation of academies ; their literature has at dif- 
ferent periods exhibited all the varieties of culture 
which have prevailed over the other European 



638 BTOGRAPHTCAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tongues ; and their language, derived both from the 
Latin and the Teutonic idiom, affords them a much 
greater facility for entering into the spirit of foreign 
letters than can be enjoyed by any other European 
people, whose language is derived almost exclusively 
from one or the other of these elements. With all 
these peculiar facilities for hterary history and crit- 
icism, why, with their habitual freedom of thought, 
have they remained in it, so far behind most other 
cultivated nations ? 



THE END. 



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